What Fidelon is
Every financial advisor and firm in America has to file public records with regulators — what they charge, the conflicts they have, and the times they got in trouble. Almost nobody reads them. We read all of them, and turn each one into a single transparency score you can check in about a minute.
Every fact behind a score comes from a document the advisor or firm filed themselves. How those facts are weighed is our own published standard — a judgment, like any rating — but it is the same standard applied to everyone, and no advisor can pay us to raise a score, rank higher, or take anything down. Why we built it.
Where does the data come from?
From the advisors and firms themselves. Every registered investment adviser and broker-dealer in America is legally required to file public disclosures with the SEC, FINRA, or their state securities regulator, covering their services, how they are paid, the conflicts they carry, and every regulatory action against them. Exactly which filings a firm submits — Form ADV, Form CRS, BrokerCheck records — depends on its registration: larger advisory firms file with the SEC, while most smaller firms file with their state. We pull those filings directly from the regulators either way.
No other inputs go in. No surveys, no interviews, no nominations, no pay-to-participate lists. If it is not in a filing, it is not in a score. What we bring is the reading — which disclosures matter, and how much — applied the same way to every advisor and firm in the country.
We read every one. More than 1.3 million filings — and counting.
Why not just read the filings yourself?
You can — they are free and public. This is a page from one firm's Form ADV:
That is one section of one page — and it is never one document. A single advisor sits behind a stack of them: the firm's Form ADV Part 1, the plain-language brochure in Part 2, the Form CRS relationship summary, and the FINRA BrokerCheck reports for both the advisor and the firm — each filed separately, on its own schedule.
Then there are the disclosures. Every complaint, fine, and regulatory action gets its own reporting page, so a clean firm's filing may run a couple of dozen pages while a firm with a long history runs into the hundreds — and at the far end, a handful of the largest carry tens of thousands of separate disclosure events. All of it is written for regulators, not for you.
Reading one advisor's full stack properly takes hours. Comparing three takes a weekend, if you know what you are looking for. That is the work we do for you — for every advisor and firm in the country, and again every time a new filing lands.
How do you score?
Every Transparency Score — one for the firm, one for the individual advisor — is built from the same four dimensions, applied the same way to all of them. Here is the short version in about two minutes:
Disclosure Record
Regulatory actions, customer complaints, fines, and censures from BrokerCheck and the Disclosure Reporting Pages of Form ADV. We score the pattern — two violations in two years is a different signal than two in twenty.
Filing Quality
How clearly the firm describes its services, fees, and investment approach in its SEC filings. A detailed, plain-English filing earns credit. Vague language, missing sections, or boilerplate lowers the score.
Conflict Disclosure
Every financial firm has conflicts of interest. We score how openly the firm explains who pays it and what it's paid to sell — whether it identifies those conflicts, explains them, and describes what it does about them. The conflict itself isn't the problem. Hiding it is.
Enforcement History
Past actions taken by regulators against the advisor or their firm, and how well the firm supervised its people. This is a record of what has already happened — not a statement about whether they can operate today.
80–100
Strong
60–79
Fair
40–59
Weak
0–39
Poor
Every data point comes from public sources: SEC Form ADV, FINRA BrokerCheck, the IAPD database, and Disclosure Reporting Pages. We don't use proprietary data, anonymous tips, or paid submissions. We read the filings that firms are legally required to submit.
Firms are scored based on the quality and completeness of their disclosures, regardless of whether they are registered as an investment adviser, broker-dealer, or both. No firm type receives a higher or lower score by default. The same methodology applies to a two-person boutique and a wirehouse with 20,000 advisors. Each component is weighted by its importance to investor protection and adjusted for the difficulty of the underlying regulatory requirements.
Scores are recalibrated periodically as our methodology evolves and as regulatory data is updated. The scoring version and date are included with every score. A firm's score may change between scoring cycles due to new filings, updated regulatory data, or methodology improvements — even if the firm's behavior hasn't changed.
For the full methodology including component weights, score distributions, and how disclosures are evaluated, see the detailed scoring methodology.
We score what firms disclose — not what they should disclose. A low score reflects disclosure gaps or regulatory history in the public record. It is not a recommendation to hire or avoid any advisor. Firms that believe their score contains a data error may contact us at corrections@fidelon.com with the specific filing they believe was misinterpreted.
How do you make money?
Advisors and firms can buy services from us — none of which touch what we publish about them. Paying us cannot move a score, a ranking, or who comes up in a search. These are the lines we hold:
Only public data. Every score traces to a specific filing. No exceptions.
Same standard for everyone. A wirehouse and a boutique measured by the same criteria. No firm type is penalized or favored by default.
Scores are not for sale. No firm, advisor, or third party can pay for a higher score. Scoring independence is non-negotiable.
We publish how it works. The four dimensions, the data sources, and the limits are all on this page — and the full methodology is public.
We are not paid for referrals. We never take a fee for sending you to an advisor, because we never send you to one — we show you the record and you decide. What advisors and firms can buy from us never changes a score, a ranking, or who appears in a search.
Corrections are welcome. If we got something wrong, tell us. Every firm can dispute a score with the specific filing data.
How do you say “Fidelon,” and what does it mean?
Fidelon · fih-DEL-un — like fidelity, with the stress in the middle.
It comes from fidelity — faithfulness — the root of fiduciary, the legal standard requiring an advisor to put your interests ahead of their own.
A fiduciary is faithful to a duty. We are faithful to the record. Our obligation runs to what the filings actually say — not to the advisors in them, not to anyone paying us, and not to a story we would rather tell. We report the record faithfully whether it flatters someone or not.
Seven questions to ask your advisor
You don't need Fidelon to ask these. But they're the questions we wish more people had asked.
A good advisor will welcome these questions. An evasive answer is itself a data point.
Research
What we publish from the filings, and the detail behind the score.
See what the filings say about your advisor
Look up any advisor or firm. Get the full picture.