A comprehensive data analysis of 56,000+ SEC-registered investment advisers — their assets, disclosures, institutional holdings, and the firms that shape American finance.
Form ADV is the SEC's registration form for investment advisers. Every firm managing money for clients must file one. The result is a remarkable dataset: 56,107 firms, collectively managing $163.2 trillion in reported assets.
Two registration types exist: SEC-Registered Investment Advisers (IAs) — firms managing $110M+ in assets and subject to full SEC oversight — and Exempt Reporting Advisers (ERAs), typically private fund managers who file a partial Form ADV but are exempt from full registration. ERAs represent nearly one-third (32.7%) of all filers.
Investment advisory firms cluster around financial hubs. New York and California together account for over 26% of all registered advisers in the country.
Connecticut's 1,621 advisers punch far above the state's population size — driven by the hedge fund capital of Greenwich and Stamford. Similarly, Massachusetts (1,971) reflects Boston's concentration of institutional asset managers like Fidelity, State Street, and Wellington Management.
A handful of mega-firms dominate the industry. The top 15 firms below collectively manage tens of trillions in assets — dwarfing the thousands of boutique advisers.
| # | Firm Name | Total AUM (Reported) | State |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Vanguard Group, Inc. | $7.9 Trillion | PA |
| 2 | Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC | $3.96 Trillion | MA |
| 3 | Capital Research and Management Company | $3.32 Trillion | CA |
| 4 | BlackRock Fund Advisors | $3.05 Trillion | CA |
| 5 | Pacific Investment Management Company LLC (PIMCO) | $2.62 Trillion | CA |
| 6 | J.P. Morgan Investment Management Inc. | $2.55 Trillion | NY |
| 7 | T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. | $1.75 Trillion | MD |
| 8 | Goldman Sachs Asset Management, L.P. | $1.66 Trillion | NY |
| 9 | Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC | $1.40 Trillion | NY |
| 10 | BlackRock Financial Management, Inc. | $1.29 Trillion | NY |
| 11 | Wellington Management Company LLP | $1.28 Trillion | MA |
| 12 | Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc. | $1.27 Trillion | NY |
| 13 | Charles Schwab Investment Management, Inc. | $1.10 Trillion | TX |
| 14 | Geode Capital Management, LLC | $1.06 Trillion | MA |
AUM figures as reported on the firm's most recent Form ADV Part 1 filing. "Regulatory AUM" per Item 5.F may differ from commercially reported AUM figures.
Form ADV Item 11 asks advisers whether they — or their personnel — have any criminal, regulatory, or civil judicial history. Answering "yes" triggers a Disclosure Reporting Page (DRP). Of the 56,107 firms in the database, 6,519 (11.6%) have at least one affirmative Item 11 disclosure.
Item 11.D covers regulatory actions taken by the SEC, CFTC, exchanges, or self-regulatory organizations — the most common category. Item 11.E covers civil court injunctions and orders. Items 11.A–11.B cover criminal indictments, pleas, and convictions. The high counts for 11.D(2) and 11.D(4) reflect many large broker-dealers registering as dual registrants (both IA and BD), carrying their broker-dealer enforcement history.
Large broker-dealer dual-registrants dominate — their large networks of registered reps generate many individual DRP events that roll up to the firm level.
| # | Firm Name | Disclosure Items | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc. | 12,958 | Broker-Dealer / IA |
| 2 | Wells Fargo Clearing Services, LLC | 11,772 | Broker-Dealer / IA |
| 3 | Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated | 6,165 | Broker-Dealer / IA |
| 4 | J.P. Morgan Securities LLC | 5,593 | Broker-Dealer / IA |
| 5 | Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. | 4,626 | Broker-Dealer / IA |
| 6 | Wells Fargo Advisors Financial Network, LLC | 4,517 | IA / BD Network |
| 7 | Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC | 4,434 | Broker-Dealer / IA |
| 8 | Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC | 4,094 | Broker-Dealer / IA |
| 9 | Harbour Investments, Inc. | 3,737 | IA |
| 10 | Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC | 3,568 | Broker-Dealer / IA |
Form 13F requires institutional managers with $100M+ AUM to disclose all long equity positions each quarter. The database contains 17,489 filings from 6,215 unique advisers, covering 6.75 million individual position records.
Summing the declared value of each issuer across all filers and periods reveals the securities that dominate institutional portfolios. iShares (BlackRock's ETF brand) tops the list as a wrapper holding billions in underlying equities.
| # | Issuer | Aggregate Reported Value | Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | iShares TR | $6.58 Trillion | ETF Family |
| 2 | MICROSOFT CORP | $4.99 Trillion | Technology |
| 3 | NVIDIA CORPORATION | $4.79 Trillion | Semiconductors |
| 4 | APPLE INC | $4.63 Trillion | Technology |
| 5 | ALPHABET INC | $3.63 Trillion | Technology |
| 6 | AMAZON COM INC | $2.70 Trillion | Technology / Retail |
| 7 | SPDR S&P 500 ETF TR | $2.53 Trillion | ETF |
| 8 | META PLATFORMS INC | $1.91 Trillion | Technology |
| 9 | VANGUARD INDEX FDS | $1.84 Trillion | ETF / Index Funds |
| 10 | BROADCOM INC | $1.83 Trillion | Semiconductors |
Six of the top 10 most-held securities by aggregate value are Big Tech — Microsoft, NVIDIA, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta. Combined, these six account for over $22.7 trillion in reported institutional holdings. NVIDIA's $4.79T position is particularly striking given that its market cap was under $1T just two years prior, illustrating how quickly AI-driven momentum reshapes institutional allocation.
$545B
The single largest position reported in any 13F filing in the database. This reflects Vanguard's or BlackRock's internally-held index fund positions, where a single ETF or fund can represent hundreds of billions.
Of the 56,107 registered advisers, only 6,215 (11.1%) are large enough to trigger the $100M 13F threshold. These firms punch well above their weight — managing the vast majority of institutional assets.
Unlike Part 1's structured checkboxes, Part 2A is a narrative document where firms describe their strategies, fees, risks, and conflicts of interest in plain English. The database currently holds 2,676 brochures extracted from SEC FOIA bulk downloads.
From analysis of Item 12 (Brokerage Practices) across available brochures, a handful of custodians dominate the RIA custody landscape:
Item 12 (Brokerage Practices) is one of the most consequential sections of any investment adviser's brochure. It discloses soft dollar arrangements (where advisers receive research or services in exchange for directing client trades to specific brokers), custodian recommendations, and any directed brokerage that may not represent best execution. Regulators scrutinize this section closely.
Every large dataset has outliers. Here are some of the most striking data points found across the Form ADV universe.
88,400,000
The registered adviser with the highest reported client count serves 88.4 million accounts — characteristic of a massive fund supermarket or robo-adviser platform serving retail investors at scale.
16,572
Total reported clients: 117 million across all advisers. The distribution is heavily right-skewed — most boutique RIAs serve dozens to hundreds of clients while a handful of mega-platforms serve millions.
$545 Billion
The single largest individual position reported in any 13F filing. This occurs when a mega-fund manager reports their internally-held ETF position at total fund NAV — a single line item representing hundreds of underlying holdings.
11.6%
Despite the high total disclosure count (548K records), only 11.6% of firms have any affirmative Item 11 answer. The skew toward large broker-dealers means the majority of boutique RIAs have clean records.
Form ADV Item 11 captures whether events occurred, not the dollar amounts or individual names involved. For granular enforcement data — specific fine amounts, named individuals, case descriptions — the SEC's full EDGAR enforcement database and individual Disclosure Reporting Pages (accessible through IAPD search) contain the detailed narratives. The largest SEC enforcement actions typically involve billions in penalties: the Goldman Sachs 1MDB settlement ($2.9B), Allianz Global Investors ($6B), and various LIBOR manipulation cases each exceeded the largest structured fine amounts in SEC history.
All data in this analysis comes from publicly available SEC filings, downloaded and parsed into a local SQLite database.
Form ADV Part 1 structured data downloaded from the SEC's bulk IAPD dataset. Part 2A brochures extracted via pypdf from SEC FOIA bulk ZIP archives (84 ZIPs, approx. Dec 2019–Dec 2024). 13F filings parsed from EDGAR full-text submission files.
SQLite (1.2GB) with tables:
This analysis reflects data as of June 2026. AUM figures are as self-reported on the most recent Form ADV filing for each firm. Regulatory AUM (RAUM) per Item 5.F may differ from commercially advertised AUM. Brochure coverage is partial (2,676 of 56,107 firms). 13F data covers filings available through the EDGAR bulk dataset. All data is publicly available from the SEC.
None of these numbers came out of a spreadsheet. This analysis is a by-product of an engineering project — a unified data pipeline, a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, and a pair of locally fine-tuned language models that together turn three disconnected SEC datasets into something an AI agent can query directly.
A polite, resumable downloader pulls the SEC bulk files — rate-limited and identified, respecting fair-access rules — then unzips and streams them through a pandas transform layer into the database. The 6.75M 13F holdings load in 10,000-row chunks. Everything joins on the CRD number, the one identifier shared across every filing.
A 1.2GB SQLite build with FTS5 full-text search for local work, and a Postgres path for production — same schema, same loader, swapped underneath.
The point of the build is that the data is shaped for an AI agent, not a human clicking around. Seven MCP tools — search_advisers, get_adviser, get_disclosures, get_brochure, get_13f_holdings, stats, and a read-only query_sql — let any MCP-aware client (Claude, Cursor, and others) ask questions of all 56,107 firms without a bespoke scraper. Two TinyLlama-1.1B models, fine-tuned with QLoRA on Q&A pairs generated from the live database, answer ADV questions on hardware I own — one general adapter, one specialized for reading disclosures.
This was the data-analysis half of the project. The engineering half — the architecture, the design decisions, and the roadmap for where it goes next — is written up on my portfolio: Regulatory Lens →