Concerned about the security of your financial portfolio under the management of your current advisor or other financial professional? AdvisorCheck is the best tool to track and monitor the person you’ve entrusted with managing your money. Learn how to use AdvisorCheck in detail, by understanding what the site can do for you, while having a keen focus on what to look for when you search for your own advisor.

If you’re spending a lot of time thinking about this topic, you may have heard about the notorious $20 billion+ Madoff investment scandal, and/or any number of other appalling stories about investors being swindled by the so-called professionals they hired to oversee and advise them on their finances. Alarming stories like these can inspire understandable concern about the well-being of your own financial portfolio under the care of your current advisor.

What does it look like to search for a disgraced, formally barred financial advisor like Bernie Madoff on the AdvisorCheck search platform? Like this:

AdvisorCheck makes it clear that Madoff is barred from acting as an advisor, not only labeling his profile with a “BARRED” stamp but also putting a disclaimer at the top of his listing: “The SEC has barred this individual from acting as a broker or investment adviser or otherwise associating with firms that sell securities or provide investment advice to the public.” 

If you navigate to look at his specific disclosures, he has a total of six dating back to 2008 and 2009. Four of these disclosures are classified specifically as “regulatory,” while one is “civil” and another is “criminal”:

You can click the down arrowhead (⌄) next to any of the listed disclosures to open up the tab for that disclosure and learn more details about it. For instance, if you click through on Madoff’s criminal disclosure, you will see a full list of all the charges associated with this disclosure. This alarming laundry list includes wire fraud, false filing with the S.E.C., securities fraud, mail fraud, international money laundering, investment adviser fraud and more:

If you have your wealth under the management of an advisor or other financial professional (or are planning to do so in the future), and you’re concerned about whether your money is in the hands of someone reliable and trustworthy, not to worry – we’ll describe how to use AdvisorCheck to effectively monitor the person you’ve entrusted with managing your money so you don’t end up in a situation like that of Madoff’s unlucky clients.

The Most Common Types of Professionals Who Manage Money

But first: what kind of professional are you working with? There are many different categories of finance professionals, each with different credentials and employed by different types of firms, who would have the expertise and qualifications to manage your money. These include:

• Financial advisors: They assist their clients with a variety of financial services, including executing trades, tax advice, financial planning, investment management, budget planning, insurance strategies, and more. Some financial advisors primarily focus on a specific area, e.g. insurance or investment.
• Financial planners: Compared to financial advisors, financial planners have a narrower focus. Financial advisors often provide financial planning, but financial planners provide planning alone. This most often involves providing guidance and assistance with budgeting and savings plans of all kinds, e.g. toward financial goals, retirement or college.
• Stockbrokers: This category of financial professional is most often an investment advisor or a registered representative (RR). They typically work for brokerage firms and are in charge of executing orders in the market on individual/institutional customers’ behalf. Stockbrokers are compensated in a few different ways, but most frequently by commission. 
• Hedge fund managers: These can be individuals or firms who operate a hedge fund (a vehicle for investment typically in the form of an LLC), making riskier and more aggressive but often more lucrative investment decisions for their pool of (typically wealthy) clients. 
• Investment fund managers: They are in charge of choosing the most effective investment strategies to maximize returns on individual/institutional investors’ pooled assets.

Whichever category the person who’s managing your money ends up falling into, it’s very likely that our recommended monitoring tool can be of assistance – read on to learn more.

Use AdvisorCheck to Monitor Financial Advisors

The easiest way to keep track of your financial advisor and their record is using the AdvisorCheck search tool. It’s simple and intuitive to use – just enter a few basic details about your financial advisor to receive an in-depth background check, free of charge. 

The search tool connects users to an enormous database of knowledge, listing more than 390,000 Investment Advisor Representatives (IARs) and more than 630,000 Registered Representatives (RRs). AdvisorCheck draws on independent, aggregated data from credible sources and filters it through its dynamic due diligence technology. 

In addition, what separates AdvisorCheck from other platforms is that, you are never for sale when using this platform. By this, we mean that we never receive back-end affiliation fees or referrals in exchange for providing our services. In practice, this means you’ll never have to worry about dealing with aggressive and persistent follow up sales calls or annoying emails as a result of using AdvisorCheck.

Whether you’re doing your due diligence to vet a new advisor, or keeping track of an advisor you’ve already been working with for a while, the search tool is an incredibly useful resource for the security of your finances, as well as for your overall peace of mind. 

How to Use AdvisorCheck

Make a Free AdvisorCheck Account

Start by heading to the AdvisorCheck sign-up page. Type in the info requested (email address and phone number) and click “Create your account.” Check your email inbox for a registration confirmation email from AdvisorCheck and click the link in that email. Once you’ve confirmed your email address, yo can head back to your dashboard and start searching for your advisor and other advisors among AdvisorCheck’s more than 1 million listings of Investment Advisor Representatives (IARs). and Registered Representatives (RRs).

Locate the Person Who Manages Your Money

Once you’ve created your AdvisorCheck account, confirmed your email address and logged in, head over to the AdvisorCheck homepage and enter your financial advisor’s name, firm, and location (city or zip code). When you run the search, you’ll receive all the records that AdvisorCheck has of advisors matching that description, sorted in order of their relevance. 

Scroll to browse for your advisor – if you entered the info accurately and AdvisorCheck has your advisor listed among their hundreds of thousands of records, you shouldn’t be scrolling for too long. When you find your advisor, click “View Report” to learn more.

Saving AdvisorCheck Profiles to Your Account

As long as you’re logged into your AdvisorCheck account, you can save an advisor to your profile by clicking the bookmark symbol at the bottom of their search result tab: 

…Or on the top right side of their AdvisorCheck listing:

Once they’re saved to your account, you’ll be able to access their listing by clicking “Saved” on the site’s left-hand sidebar. 

The ability to save advisors and refer back to your list at a later time also makes AdvisorCheck a great tool for researching and keeping track of prospective advisors, empowering you with as much info as possible before you choose your next hire. Most importantly, as long as your advisor’s listing is saved on your AdvisorCheck profile, you will be notified of any new disclosures or other additions/updates to your advisor’s record. This makes monitoring your advisor a foolproof process.

What AdvisorCheck Shows You

Finding your advisor on AdvisorCheck provides you with a wealth of info – here’s one example of a profile on the site, starting from the default “General” tab (which highlights the most significant info about the advisor, such as their number of disclosures and years of experience):

The platform connects you with sometimes difficult to access information consisting of your advisor’s registrations, legal records and professional conduct. Listed in order of most to least important (although this may vary depending on your priorities), here’s a general overview of exactly what AdvisorCheck can show you:

• Disclosures, which are any legal violations they’ve committed in the past that are now part of the public record for the sake of transparency
• Professional credentials that your advisor has earned
• Exam(s) that your advisor has taken and when they took them
• Advisor profile, including contact info and links to their website and LinkedIn profile
• Past employment and years of experience
• Firm profile, including average account size, total client assets, number of employees, disclosures, official documents and more 
• Other business, if they have any

Next, we’ll dive into each of the five sections on every AdvisorCheck profile:

Experience

Once you’re on your advisor’s profile, click over to the “Experience” tab for even more details on their work history and info about both their current and their past firms. You’ll find their firm’s address, documents like their latest Form ADV and Customer Relationship Summary (CRS), number of accounts and amount of assets under management, the states in which they operate and much more.

Exams/Licenses

The “Exams/Licenses” tab is another goldmine of information, where you can find their certified licenses, lists of state/SRO registrations, and exams they’ve passed including state security law exams (Series 66, 65 and/or 63), general industry and products exams and principal/supervisory exams. 

Disclosures

This tab shows your advisor’s disclosures, if they have any (the advisor we’ve chosen for our example does not). If your advisor does have disclosure(s) on their record, these could include criminal charges, civil proceedings, terminations, sanctions and customer complaints, among other types of disclosures.

Firm

Last but not least is the tab describing firm information, which covers just about everything you might need to know about the firm where your advisor works, split into four sub-tab categories: 

• Information, which covers address and other contact info, firm size, date established, type of firm, number of employees, services offered, types of fees and costs, websites associated with the firm and more.
• Documents, showing the latest Form ADV, Customer Relationship Summary (CRS), brochures and other firm documents.
• Statistics, where you’ll find details like the average account size of the firm, the total of client assets, the number of employees and clients and the number of disclosures of different types. 
• People, which lists direct owners and executive officers for the firm (e.g., shareholders, CEOs, CFOs and directors).

AdvisorCheck Can Also Notify You of New Events

In addition to helping you locate major red flags in your advisor’s legal and professional background, AdvisorCheck can help you keep track of any new events on the record of an advisor you’ve already hired. For example, when you save an advisor’s listing to your AdvisorCheck profile, your dashboard will notify you as soon as new events like disclosures and bankruptcy are added to your advisor’s record.

What to Look Out for When Monitoring Financial Professionals: Disclosures

Disclosures are a particularly significant red flag to look out for on your advisor’s record. (That’s why AdvisorCheck highlights the number of disclosures an advisor has, if any, in bright red – so you definitely can’t miss it when scanning their profile.) 

Here’s an example of what that looks like, with this example advisor in particular having three disclosures on their record:

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, disclosures are prior civil, criminal, regulatory or disciplinary actions that are part of an advisor’s official record through Form ADV. This reporting allows consumers to make informed decisions about who they work with, and it is a legal requirement in the U.S. thanks to the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

On an advisor’s AdvisorCheck listing, click on the “Disclosures” tab and you’ll see more details about the nature of the disclosure(s), if there are any. Keep in mind that disclosures can vary significantly in their severity, from a minor customer complaint to a major legal/ethical violation on the part of an advisor. This is why, if you do come across any disclosures, you should assess them on a case-by-case basis. Don’t automatically assume that having more disclosures on their record automatically means someone is a less reliable or trustworthy advisor. 

How serious must a disclosure be for you to reconsider your relationship with your advisor? It’s ultimately up to you whether a disclosure is worrisome enough that you’re no longer comfortable working with an advisor. In general, though, if you ask your advisor about a disclosure on their record (perhaps as part of a series of questions you’re meeting with them to ask) and it appears to be a one-time mistake – especially if it happened a long time ago – it’s likely that you can safely overlook it. 

On the other hand, if an issue like customer complaints appears to be a pattern, it can be an indication that your advisor actually has a problem and you might want to reconsider working with them. If this is the case, here’s our advice on how to go about the potentially awkward and stressful process of firing your financial advisor.

And for even more advice on the important topic of financial advisor red flags, browse our list of the nine most common mistakes investors make when looking for a financial advisor, as well as our list of five reasons not to hire a financial advisor.

“Some financial advisors may have done something as a teenager that just followed them around for the rest of their lives,” says Leonard Kim of AdvisorCheck. “Other advisors have done something outrageous like moving all of their client’s funds into a new vehicle without the permission of their clients. At times, you can see an advisor who had a disagreement with a client, but the case was dismissed. This will still indicate a record on the disclosure area, even though the advisor or firm won the dispute. The information is quite thorough, as the advisor and/or broker does have an opportunity to respond to many of the disclosures that appear on one’s record,” Leonard Kim continued.

How to Select the Right Advisor Using the AdvisorCheck Compare Tool

If you learn new information that prompts you to fire your current financial advisor, using AdvisorCheck makes it easy to choose the right professional as their replacement. You can search for advisors in your area (as well as by accreditation, type and even their specific firm) and it’s easy to save prospective hires’ listings to your profile for future reference. 

During this process, AdvisorCheck’s comparison tool is going to be an especially useful feature – in a nutshell, it allows you to directly compare up to three advisors at a time. It’s also incredibly simple to use – just click the scale icon in the search tab on every AdvisorCheck listing to add an advisor to your account’s “Compare” section:

Once you’ve added up to three profiles for comparison, click “Compare” on the left-hand menu to get started: 

When you use the Compare tool, you’ll see a concise side-by-side list of up to about 80 percent of each advisor’s essential details required to make an informed choice, divided into three main sections:

• Basic information (e.g., location, number of disclosures, years of experience, credentials)
• Firm information (e.g., average account size, assets under management, total number of clients, disclosures associated with their firm)
• Advisor profile (e.g. contact info, languages they speak, minimum assets, areas of expertise, type(s) of compensation)

Here’s an example of a comparison of three different advisors using the AdvisorCheck Compare tool:

Structuring the wealth of information provided by AdvisorCheck in this way makes it easy to identify each potential advisor’s most significant pros and cons and, ultimately, to make your most informed possible hiring decision.

AdvisorCheck Provides Essential Peace of Mind About an Important Professional Relationship

When someone has been tasked with a responsibility as consequential as managing your money, you want to make sure they have integrity and that they have proven themselves worthy of your trust. Consistently monitoring your advisor’s record for any major red flags is the most effective way to attain that kind of peace of mind, and AdvisorCheck is the best tool out there to do so. 

AdvisorCheck provides you with detailed background information on financial professionals free of charge and makes it easier to monitor for new events like disclosures and bankruptcy when they’re added to your advisor’s record, as your AdvisorCheck dashboard will show new changes to your saved advisors’ histories. The plaftorm puts access to info that you might not otherwise have known was out there right at your fingertips, leaving you significantly more protected from serious outcomes like financial fraud and advisor misconduct.

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Written by Billy Quirk

Fact checked by Luke Jara

Reviewed by KJ Kim

Disclosure

The information provided in this article was written by the research and analysis team at AdvisorCheck.com to help all consumers in their financial journeys, by providing the resources and the insights to help improve one’s financial health, make it through recessionary and inflationary periods of time, and save their earnings to use them towards building a secure financial future. 

Unauthorized reproduction or use of this material is strictly prohibited without prior approval. Any parties interested in content syndication, references, interviews, or PR, please contact our marketing team at marketing@aimranalytics.com

AdvisorCheck.com is an independent data and analytics company founded on the principles of helping to provide transparency, simplicity, and conflict-free information to all consumers. As an independent company providing conflict-free information, Advisorcheck.com does not participate, engage with, or receive funding from any affiliate marketing programs or services. To become a free AdvisorCheck member, visit advisorcheck.com/signup.