I Launched Best Investors!
Okay, I’ve been sitting on this one for a while and I’m stoked to post about it. My other project, Best Investors, launched!
Best Investors is a searchable directory of SEC-registered investment advisers. It covers firms, individual advisors and their offices, and all of it is built from public government filings + proprietary data sources. It covers 40,000+ registered firms and over 600,000+ investment professionals across so much of the financial industry.
I wanted to make this site for years and have been working on this on and off for several years now, even with AI this is extremely complex..
Sooooo…. What Is Best Investors?
There is a ridiculous amount of important data regarding investment advisors that is supplied through filings, but isn’t used well to surface the best investors or help people find relevant advisors.
Some facts are already public. Every SEC-registered investment adviser files a form called Form ADV. It says how much money they manage, how many clients they have, where their offices are, how they get paid, and whether they have any disclosures. The government publishes all of it.
The problem is that the official source is a filing system, not something you’d ever want to browse. So Best Investors takes those public records and turns them into normal web pages: one for each firm, each advisor and each office. You can search them by location, compare them, and actually read them.
Where Does the Data Come From?
This is the government data part I’m excited about. Best Investors is built from the SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure (IAPD) public XML feeds. That covers SEC-registered firms, state-registered firms and individual advisors. The offices are geocoded so you can search by distance.
I want to be super clear about one thing, because the site is clear about it too: Best Investors is not the SEC. It republishes the public feeds and makes them searchable. The official record is still IAPD, and the site tells you to confirm a firm’s CRD number there before you hire anyone. There’s a whole page about it: Why Best Investors is a filing source.
What Can I Do on Best Investors?
A lot! Here’s the tour.
Find an Advisor Near You
Type a zip or a city and it finds registered offices near you, sorted by distance. You can also browse by place, starting from the financial advisors by state page, or by specialty: wealth management, financial planning, 401(k), private equity, venture capital and more. Those specialties are tagged from what the firms report on Form ADV.
Take the Advisor Quiz
Don’t know where to start? The advisor quiz asks what you want help with, then your ZIP, retirement timing, assets, meetings and fees. After that it gives you matching nearby firms. And this is my favorite part: you choose who to contact. You can pick multiple advisors to send messages to and it will contact them on your behalf.
Compare the Biggest Firms
The top investment advisory firms page ranks firms by assets under management, number of advisors, clients and offices. There’s also a top investors page for individual advisors plus many more additional leaderboards not available on any other site.
Read a Real Firm Profile
This is where all that data work shows up. Every firm profile has a filing snapshot with regulatory AUM, clients, advisors, offices, client mix and the services they report. It also has registration details, every office location, the registered advisors, and the full Form ADV Part 1A answers with their item codes.
Here’s Morningstar Investment Management’s profile as an example.
Advisor profiles have registration history, employers, exams and disclosures.
Actually Understand Form ADV
Let’s be honest, nobody knows what “Item 5G(1)” means. So I made the Form ADV guide. It has plain-language explainers for the Form ADV Part 1A questions, and the item codes on firm profiles link right to them. There’s also an advisor hiring FAQ with practical steps, like how to check if an advisor is registered.
Daily Advisor News
Every day the SEC publishes new feeds, so every day Best Investors scans what changed. Best Investors Daily Advisor News shows the biggest AUM movers, new firms and firm exits for that day. Here’s the November 3, 2026 edition as an example. There’s a free email newsletter too if you want it in your inbox.
Price the Advice With Calculators
Before you hire anyone, you should know what they actually cost in dollars. There are four fee calculators:
- Advisor fee calculator: turns a percent, flat or hourly fee into dollars for this year and the years ahead.
- 401(k) rollover cost: compares keeping the money in the workplace plan with moving it to an IRA.
- Fee and retirement income: shows how much of a retirement withdrawal goes to the fee.
- Commission or yearly fee: compares a one-time commission with a yearly percent.
Agent Tool Lookups
Yep, I did the same thing here that I did with the Calculator Tools tool-call pages. AI agents that look up SEC adviser filings use function names like adv_search_firm or SearchIAPDFirm. The agent tool lookups page has a page for each of those names, and each one runs that lookup against the directory.
How Is It Different From Everything Else?
There’s a whole compare directories section that’s honest about this. It covers when to use Best Investors and when to use SEC IAPD, FINRA BrokerCheck, SmartAsset or a matching service.
The short version is that it’s a census directory. It includes every registered adviser in the feed, not a hand-picked network of advisors who paid to be there. And when something is paid, it says so. Firms and advisors can claim their profile, and Pro listings ($9.99/month) sort first. The site labels that as paid placement, not a quality score. I think that’s the right way to do it.
Is This Financial Advice?
Nope! Just like the site says, Best Investors is not investment advice, not legal advice, and not the SEC or FINRA. Filings are self-reported by the firms, so always check the official records before you hire anyone. I just built the thing that makes the public data easier to look at. 😄
Why Did I Build This?
Because all this information is public, and it should be easy to use! Government data is amazing, but it’s really hard to work with. Turning daily SEC feeds into hundreds of thousands of pages you can actually read was a huge project, and I’m really happy with how it turned out.
And yes, I built the whole thing myself. I did use AI agents to help me along the way (of course I did, you’ve read this blog 😄), but don’t let anybody tell you an AI agent makes a project like this quick. Even with AI agents helping, it took a LONG time. Government data is messy, there’s a ton of it, and getting every firm, advisor and office page right took a lot of patience. Totally worth it though.
If you liked my other projects like Calculator Tools or The Village, this one is a little more grown-up, but I think it’s just as cool.
Did You Really Not Click the Link Yet?
Come on! Go search for an advisor near you on Best Investors, look up a firm you’ve heard of, or check out today’s Daily Advisor News. Let me know what you think!