Is your advisor's
firm clean?

Each broker-dealer firm receives an A-F safety grade based on its FINRA disclosure history — the count and severity of customer complaints, regulatory actions, and arbitration awards reported on the firm's Form BD, normalized against firm size. A-grade firms have minimal disciplinary history; F-grade firms have a high concentration of disclosures relative to their representative headcount. Grades update when new FINRA data is released.

Form U4 is the Uniform Application for Securities Industry Registration filed by a broker-dealer when registering an individual representative with FINRA, the SEC, and state regulators. Form U5 is the Uniform Termination Notice filed when that representative leaves — it documents the reason for departure, including any allegations of misconduct. Disclosures on either form become part of the public BrokerCheck record and feed into our firm-level disclosure counts.

An A grade means the firm reports fewer than the median rate of disclosures per registered representative. B and C grades indicate average to slightly elevated disclosure rates. D and F grades mean the firm has materially more customer complaints, regulatory actions, or financial-industry-related disclosures per representative than peer firms of similar size. The grade is a relative measure — every firm with an active registration appears, regardless of grade.

Firm-level disclosure data comes from FINRA BrokerCheck and the SEC IAPD (Investment Adviser Public Disclosure) databases. We refresh our snapshot quarterly. Individual disclosure events that have been reported to FINRA but not yet posted publicly will not appear until FINRA publishes them, which can lag the underlying event by 30 to 90 days. Always cross-check material decisions against BrokerCheck.org directly.

A broker-dealer (BD) buys and sells securities for customers and is regulated by FINRA and the SEC under suitability standards. An investment adviser (IA) provides advice about securities for compensation and is regulated by the SEC or state securities regulators under a fiduciary duty. Many firms are dually registered. PlainAdvisorCheck currently focuses on broker-dealer firm records; many of those firms are also IA-registered, which we note where applicable.

FINRA-reportable disclosures include customer complaints (formal grievances about a representative's conduct), arbitration awards and settlements, regulatory actions (sanctions by FINRA, the SEC, or state regulators), criminal matters, civil judgments and liens, terminations after allegations, and certain bankruptcies. Not every disclosure indicates wrongdoing — some are dismissed or resolved without finding fault — but the cumulative pattern across a firm is a meaningful signal of compliance culture.