Missouri 34 Disclosures per Firm: Top US States for Advisor Regulatory Density

Findings

Missouri tops the list at 34.3 disclosures per firm

Among firms with a reported principal-office state, the PlainAdvisorCheck firms table logs Missouri at 34.3 disclosures per firm across 36 firms and 1,236 total disclosures. SEC Investment Adviser Public Disclosure (IAPD), FINRA BrokerCheck, Broker-Dealer Registration and Disclosure Three large multi-office broker-dealers drive most of this volume: Wells Fargo Clearing Services (489 disclosures), Edward Jones (325), and Stifel, Nicolaus & Company (251), together 1,065 of Missouri's 1,236 total, or 86%. Edward Jones profile captures these entries broken out by state. Rhode Island follows at 31.3 disclosures per firm across 7 firms and 219 total disclosures.

Rhode Island's entry stands out because one firm, Fidelity Brokerage Services (152 disclosures), accounts for 69% of the state's 219 total. Montana logs 12.5 disclosures per firm across 4 firms and 50 total disclosures, driven by D.A. Davidson & Co. (48). SEC Form ADV, Part 1A State Registration Information

PlainAdvisorCheck's states table links each firm's principal-office state to state-level aggregates, isolating Missouri's 36 firms from the 56 reporting jurisdictions. This setup exposes how three large firms concentrate Missouri's average; South Carolina, the next state examined, shows an even sharper single-firm concentration.

South Carolina concentrates at 19.7 per firm, driven almost entirely by one firm

South Carolina records 19.7 disclosures per firm across 15 headquartered firms and 295 total disclosures in the firms table. FINRA BrokerCheck, Broker-Dealer Registration and Disclosure, SEC IAPD LPL Financial LLC, headquartered in Fort Mill, reports 289 of South Carolina's 295 total disclosures, 98% of the state's aggregate, despite operating nearly 33,000 branch offices nationwide. LPL Financial profile details these entries, with the firm's principal-office state linking back to South Carolina's aggregate. New Jersey, in contrast, spreads its disclosure volume across many more firms.

New Jersey tallies 114 firms with a reported state, yielding a 12.9 average from 1,470 total disclosures, well below South Carolina's per-firm rate despite a far larger absolute total. UBS Financial Services Inc., headquartered in Weehawken, contributes 926 of New Jersey's 1,470 disclosures. Minnesota, by comparison, holds 551 total disclosures across 42 firms (13.1 per firm), led by Piper Sandler & Co. (192) and Ameriprise Financial Services (184). SEC Form ADV, Part 1A State Registration Information

South Carolina's 295 total disclosures are modest in absolute terms next to New Jersey's 1,470, yet per-firm rates differ sharply because South Carolina's count concentrates in a single large firm spread across few in-state headquarters records, while New Jersey's total spreads across many more firms.

New York anchors the high-volume, low-average tier

New York reports 8.7 disclosures per firm across 868 firms and 7,592 total disclosures, the largest reporting-state firm count by a wide margin. SEC IAPD, FINRA BrokerCheck, Broker-Dealer Registration and Disclosure Citigroup Global Markets Inc. alone contributes 1,233 disclosures, more than any single firm nationwide, followed by Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC (552) and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC (547). All 80,028 firm profiles provide context beyond state aggregates.

New York's large firm count keeps its per-firm average low despite the largest absolute disclosure total among reporting states. The contrast with the top-ranked states is the point: Missouri's 1,236 disclosures spread over only 36 firms produce a 34.3 average, while New York's far larger 7,592-disclosure total spread over 868 firms produces an average of 8.7. SEC Form ADV, Part 1A State Registration Information

Failing grades are rare and largely unreported by state: across the whole registry 250 firms grade F, assigned by branch-normalized disclosure intensity rather than by state, but only 26 of those F-grade firms have a reported principal-office state at all, so no single state's ranking concentrates a large share of them. A state's average disclosures-per-firm and its count of F-graded firms measure different things: the average is a volume ratio among reporting firms, while the grade reflects how concentrated a firm's disclosures are across its own branch offices.

Coverage and limitations

PlainAdvisorCheck draws from SEC Investment Adviser Public Disclosure (IAPD) and FINRA BrokerCheck databases, ingesting firm-level records through automated extraction pipelines. The firms table populates via snapshots of IAPD's registration data and BrokerCheck's disclosure reports; of the 20,055 firms with a confirmed FINRA record, only 3,000 (about 15%) carry a reported principal-office state, spread across 56 state and territory jurisdictions with 18,066 total disclosures among reporting firms. The states table derives aggregates from these. Data methodology details the ingestion process, including normalization of disclosure counts from SEC Form ADV Part 1A filings.

Upstream agencies maintain daily release cadences: SEC IAPD updates via continuous Form ADV submissions, while FINRA BrokerCheck refreshes disclosure events in near-real-time. PlainAdvisorCheck captures periodic vintages rather than live feeds, flagging revisions through timestamp columns in the firms table. Coverage excludes dual-registered entities not headquartered in a reporting state, and the majority of confirmed firms simply have no principal-office state on file in FINRA's public data, a limitation of the source, not this pipeline.

Data vintage reflects the latest stable snapshot before pipeline freeze, differing from current API endpoints at SEC or FINRA that stream live amendments. Revisions appear in subsequent vintages via delta updates. Methodology page outlines revision handling, ensuring firms table integrity across all 80,028 discovered profiles. SEC IAPD, FINRA BrokerCheck, Broker-Dealer Registration and Disclosure

Entity exclusion criteria omit exempt reporting advisers and certain foreign broker-dealers absent from Form ADV state sections, limiting scope to registered investment advisers and broker-dealers with U.S. headquarters. Cross-references to Enforcement action directory link disclosure events to regulatory outcomes, while the states table exposes long-tail distributions among the 3,000 firms with a reported state.

Interlinking with enforcement directories via firm identifiers bridges disclosure counts to action details. Methodology emphasizes verbatim retention of upstream fields, avoiding imputation for gaps like unregistered offices, which is why the majority of firms without a reported state are left out of this ranking entirely rather than assigned a default location.

Public-records terminology governs: "disclosure" denotes formal regulatory notations per BrokerCheck protocol, distinct from internal compliance logs. Form ADV Part 1A feeds state registration info where FINRA's own record includes it.

The firms table and states table in PlainAdvisorCheck reveal Missouri leading at 34.3 disclosures per firm across 36 reporting firms, propelled by Wells Fargo Clearing Services, Edward Jones, and Stifel Nicolaus. South Carolina follows at 19.7 per firm across 15 firms, driven almost entirely by LPL Financial LLC. New York anchors the high-volume tier at 8.7 per firm across 868 firms and 7,592 total disclosures, large in absolute terms but spread thinly per firm. Failing grades are rare and rarely tied to a reported state: only 26 of 250 F-grade firms nationwide have a reported principal-office state. Coverage across 56 reporting jurisdictions totals 18,066 disclosures among the 3,000 of 20,055 confirmed firms with a reported state, a minority of the full register, so these rankings should always be read as rates among reporting firms, never a full 50-state census.