In a recent new release, the Tennessee Securities Division urged investors to ask tough questions of their investment advisors, and about their compensation, account arrangements and educational / regulatory history. The May 26 release is here.

SEC-registered investment advisors are required to provide the answers to those (and other) questions on their ADV Part 2, which is kept on file with the SEC and publicly-available through the Commission’s IA Public Disclosure Portal, here.

Information on registered broker-dealers and their associated persons is available through FINRA’s BrokerCheck® web service, here. FINRA and its out-going CEO Richard Ketchum have said that the organization is considering expanding the information available through BrokerCheck® and also making the data available for mining by academic institutions. We discussed those issues:

– “expanding,” here.

– “mining,” here.

The US Department of Labor’s recent Fiduciary-duty rules will require extensive disclosures about compensation practices, relationships and potential conflicts-of-interest among those advising retail retirement investors. We summarized those rules here.

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