Fidelon publishes TransparencyScores, profile summaries, analytical reports, and educational content about the financial advisory industry. This page documents the standards that content is produced under, how it is attributed, and how it gets corrected.
Editorial Independence
Fidelon's scores and content are produced independently of any commercial relationship with the firms and advisers we cover. No advertiser, sponsor, firm, or adviser can pay to change a score, suppress a finding, or alter published content. This is not a policy preference — it is a structural constraint: the scoring pipeline has no input path from Fidelon's commercial operations. See the integrity firewall.
Sourcing
Every factual claim in Fidelon content traces to a public regulatory record — a Form ADV item number, a Disclosure Reporting Page, a BrokerCheck record, an IAPD entry, a state registry. Where we cite a filing, we identify the document, the item, and the filing date. We do not publish findings we cannot source. Where a filing is ambiguous, we say it is ambiguous rather than drawing an unsupported conclusion.
No anonymous sources. Fidelon does not publish claims from tips, user submissions, or unverified reports. If it isn't in the public record, it isn't on Fidelon.
How Content Is Produced
Fidelon operates at the scale of the full registered industry — hundreds of thousands of profiles — so most profile content is generated by an automated pipeline, including AI-drafted plain-English summaries of what each adviser's or firm's public filings contain. Quality is enforced at the pipeline level, not by a human reading each page:
- Generation is constrained to the underlying public record — summaries describe what filings say, with the source data attached to the profile
- The same generation and scoring logic applies to every profile; there are no manual overrides
- Automated validation checks outputs against the structured source data
- Every profile carries a correction path, and corrections feed back into the pipeline
Editorial content that is written rather than generated — research reports, methodology explainers, educational guides — is reviewed before publication against the standards below.
What We Say and What We Don't
Fidelon content presents verifiable facts from regulatory filings and analytical conclusions derived from the published scoring framework — clearly labeled as such. We do not:
- Offer investment advice or recommend hiring or avoiding any adviser
- Make character judgments about individuals
- Publish unsourced allegations
- Use language implying legal conclusions only a court can reach
Fidelon's analytical framework operates under the same principles that protect institutional ratings: the criteria are published, consistently applied, and independent, and the underlying data is public and verifiable. That protection depends on the sourcing discipline above, which is why it is enforced structurally.
Corrections
Fidelon corrects factual errors promptly.
- Email corrections@fidelon.com with the URL, the specific error, and the corrective information with a source.
- Fidelon investigates within 10 business days.
- Warranted corrections are made with a notice identifying what changed and when.
- Errors in the underlying report data follow the Dispute & Correction Policy — that process governs factual corrections; this page governs editorial content.
Standards Checklist
All Fidelon content is held to these standards:
- Every factual claim traces to a specific, verifiable public record
- No investment advice; no character judgment
- Plain English — technical terms defined on first use
- Analytical conclusions labeled as such and connected to their evidence
- Material limitations of data and methodology acknowledged