RIA Intelligence
Registered investment advisers, the advisors registered through them, the capital they report, the private vehicles they run and the people who own them, as a graph with a filing date behind every number. RAUM is what the adviser filed, a move is two registration dates, and a class is a rule you can read.
What this is built from, and what each number means
Form ADV, every filing. The SEC publishes every Form ADV filing since November 2011 as structured data: the base form (Items 1 to 12) and every Schedule D table (offices, other business names, websites, related persons, private funds and their custodians, administrators and auditors), plus Schedule A and B owners. The extract runs to 2024-12-31. From January 2025 the SEC’s monthly adviser roster carries the latest filing’s answers for every registered adviser, one snapshot a month. The daily IAPD firm feed carries the same answers one day after a filing. Together they are one tape: every registered adviser’s reported RAUM, clients, employees, offices, custody, wrap programs, private funds and affiliations, on every filing date.
IAPD individuals, daily. The SEC publishes a daily compilation of every person with a current investment adviser registration: name, current firm and branch, each state registration with its date, every previous registered firm with begin and end dates, exams, designations, and the self-reported ten-year employment history. This is the advisor layer and the movement tape.
Both are United States government works published for public disclosure. Registered here with their rights basis: Form ADV filing data, the SEC roster, the IAPD firm and individual feeds (open); FINRA BrokerCheck (restricted, not crawled); competitor databases (prohibited).
Reported is what a form says, on the date it says it: RAUM (Item 5.F), clients and RAUM by type (Item 5.D), employees (5.A, 5.B), offices (1.F.5), custody (9.A), private funds (Schedule D 7.B.(1)), owners (Schedule A), related persons (Schedule D 7.A), registration dates (IAPD). Derived is arithmetic over reported values with the inputs printed: private-client share, RAUM per advisor (firm RAUM over the IAPD headcount; not a book size), growth between two annual amendments, the firm class. Estimated values carry a model, inputs and a range; there are none on the site today. Signals are dated events with a source and an evidence class; no signal is a prediction.
A rule over the latest filing, printed on every firm page as its basis. Wirehouses and national broker-dealer RIAs are a short curated list of CRDs. Otherwise: private-client share (individual plus HNW RAUM over total) at least 50 percent is a wealth manager, split into independent, broker-dealer affiliated (Item 7.A.1 and at least 50 registered reps) and bank affiliated (7.A.6 and a bank, bancorp or trust company as a 50 percent or greater owner on Schedule A; the 7.A.6 flag alone marks 160 independent RIAs that own a trust company, Fisher, Focus Partners, Cerity, Pathstone and Cresset among them); 20 to 50 percent is mixed; fund share (pooled vehicles, investment companies, BDCs, other advisers) at least 60 percent with under 10 percent private clients is an asset manager; institutional share at least 70 percent is an institutional manager. Filings before 2017 reported Item 5.D as ranges, so a firm whose latest filing predates 2017 has no share and falls to “other”.
A move is a previous registration on IAPD ending at firm A and the next registration (previous or current) beginning at firm B. The left date is the registration end; the registered date is the next registration’s begin; a gap over 400 days is typed “after a gap”. Re-registration at the same firm is not a move. People who leave the industry drop off the IAPD feed, so the historical tape only holds moves by people still registered today; from September 2026 the daily feed diff records departures as they happen. The type reads the class of each firm as of the move date for teams (the class rule applied to the filing in effect that day, so a firm that has since left the roster keeps the class it had) and today’s class for individual moves; a destination that first filed within a year of the move and reports no RAUM yet is typed “to a newly registered adviser”. A wirehouse-to-RIA move is a breakaway by definition of the classes, not by any judgement about the person.
A team is two or more advisors whose registrations through one firm ended within fourteen days of each other, from branches in the same state, and who all registered next through the same other firm. Clustering by state rather than by city keeps a nine-person Darien team whose tenth member sat in Stamford whole; the fourteen-day chain keeps the steady wirehouse-to-wirehouse flow inside one state from linking into one cluster (at forty-five days it did). The kind is a printed rule. Absorbed: the destination filed a succession naming the firm, or the cluster carried half or more of the firm’s registered people that day (three or more), which is an acquisition or a re-registration seen from the people side. Channel change: the two CRDs are one enterprise, because they file under the same business name (the two Wells Fargo Advisors channels), both report the same 75%+ owner on Schedule A around the move (TD Ameritrade to Schwab after 2020, Cadaret Grant to LPL after 2024), or one name is the other with a word added; the reason is printed on the team, and channel changes are never counted as teams in or out. Large transfer: fifty or more, not absorbed. Lift-out: everything else. The headcount behind the share counts registration spans of people still on IAPD, so it is understated for old clusters and printed as an estimate. Corporate re-registrations (twenty-five or more people to one new CRD in a month, half or more of that firm’s departures) are excluded before teams form. The enterprise test also types the single move: a registration that ends at one CRD of an enterprise and begins at another is a channel change, kept out of the flows, the departure rates and the signals, and shown on the advisor’s page as what it is.
The SEC filing extract ends 2024-12-31 and neither the monthly roster nor the IAPD feeds carry Schedule A, so an adviser first registered in 2025 or later had no owners on the graph. For those advisers the owners are read from the current Form ADV PDF on IAPD. Schedule A gives each individual owner’s CRD number, which is the same key IAPD uses for the person, so an owner links to an advisor page by identifier and never by name. When an advisor is a direct owner of an adviser that first registered in the last year while still registered through another firm, the advisor page says so as a fact, with the measured base rate beside it: of owners registered through a wirehouse at the time of the new adviser’s first filing in 2023 to 2025, 95 of 97 registered through the new adviser within a year, a median 55 days after the filing. That is a rate, not a forecast about the person.
The practice profile derives operating metrics from reported Form ADV fields, each with its formula beside it: RAUM per advisor (RAUM over the IAPD count of registered representatives), clients per advisor (individual and HNW clients over advisors), average HNW client (HNW RAUM over HNW clients), average account (RAUM over Item 5.F accounts), discretionary and institutional shares, employees per advisor, advisors per office (Item 1.F.5 offices plus one), and one-year growth between the last two annual amendments. An archetype is a rule over those fields and Schedule A (for example, PE backed means a Schedule A entity owner at 25 percent or more whose exact legal name is a private equity fund vehicle or a classified sponsor on the DFX private equity graph); a firm can carry several and every rule is printed beside the label. Fields the form does not give (advisor book size, revenue) are marked unknown and never estimated.
An anomaly is a reported value or a filing-to-filing change that stands out against comparable advisers; it is where to look, never a conclusion. Peer groups are segment (independent wealth, affiliated wealth, wirehouse and national broker-dealer, asset manager, institutional, other) by RAUM band, at least thirty advisers, falling back to the segment alone. A static outlier sits at or beyond the 2nd or 98th percentile of its peers and at least three robust deviations (median absolute deviation, floored so a peer group that all answers 100 percent does not make 99 percent an outlier) from the peer median. A change clears a base-size threshold (a move from two to four employees is not two hundred to four hundred) and sits in the top or bottom decile of changes among peers, so a market year does not flag every adviser. Combinations pair two changes (RAUM down, advisors stable; a control person gone and departures doubled; a firm absorbed and its advisors gone within a year). Data quality rows, values that are probably filing errors, are kept apart and never mixed with economic anomalies. There is no master score.
Only business contact points published by the firm itself, or filed on Form ADV, are shown, each with its source, the page or filing it was read from, and the date: the principal office phone (Item 1.F), the website and the firm’s LinkedIn page and social accounts (Item 1.I, which for about 4,000 firms also lists the LinkedIn profiles of their own people), and, from the firm website, the team page, a contact page with a form, general mailboxes at the firm’s domain, and for a registered person whose name matches exactly one advisor at that firm, the bio link, the LinkedIn link, a mailto and a tel: link beside the name and the printed title. Nothing is guessed: no pattern-derived emails, no phone lookups, no personal accounts, no home addresses. A source usable internally but not for republication is held from every public view.
An advisor’s assets are not public. Nothing on an advisor page is a book size, and nothing is estimated until an estimation method has been measured against disclosed cases and can print a range with its inputs. Mobility signals (tenure, firm events, team departures, registration changes, entity formation) are being validated against the historical movement tape: the question is what public evidence appeared 30, 90, 180 and 365 days before known moves, against people who did not move. No score is published until precision, lift and lead time are measured. Preferred wording, when it ships, is “elevated observable transition signals”, never “is leaving”.
Individual disclosure flags and detail (IAPD publishes them; DFX does not republish them), outside-business text (often a home address), individuals’ branch street addresses, signatories. Contact points are not on these pages. RAUM sums across affiliated advisers that report the same assets (a fund complex’s adviser and sub-adviser both report), so industry totals overstate unique assets and the site says so beside them.
A firm or fund links to the venture, private equity, family office or independent sponsor graphs only on a shared identifier: the same CRD, CIK or SEC private fund id, or the same Schedule A owner id. Names are never a join. The RIA graph is a member of the Data Factory identity layer on those bases.
The Form ADV extract is republished by the SEC roughly yearly; the roster is monthly; the IAPD feeds are daily and the graph reads them daily. Aggregates (flows, growth, state and custodian tables) refresh hourly. Each firm page prints its latest filing date and each advisor page the feed date it was read from.