ADV Screener
A project I started because adviser disclosures were public but still annoying to compare.
ADV Screener exists because I got tired of the gap between public availability and actual usability. The filings are there. The patience they demand is the problem.
The Frustration: Public Doesn’t Mean Usable
Investment adviser data is technically public. But “public” on the SEC website usually means clicking through Byzantine directory trees, wrestling with stripped-out HTML frames, and manually aggregating Form ADV Part 1 and Part 2 brochures just to answer basic questions: How much AUM do they actually manage? What are their fee structures? Do they have regulatory flags?
When you’re doing manager research or allocator diligence, you don’t want to spend 20 minutes parsing a government interface just to decide if a firm is worth a 20-minute phone call. The friction of the interface gets in the way of actual analysis.
The Solution: A Frictionless Entry Point
I built ADV Screener to act as a cleaner, faster research layer that gets out of your way. It ingests SEC data and restructures it into an interface designed for human scanning rather than bureaucratic storage. It lets you compare, filter, and notice patterns without feeling like you are wrestling the interface before you’ve even started thinking.
Key Capabilities
- Instant Filtering: Filter advisers by the details that actually matter during early diligence—AUM brackets, client types, and regulatory disclosures.
- Side-by-Side Comparison: Evaluate multiple firms simultaneously without getting buried in raw documents first.
- Contextual Red Flags: Surface disciplinary changes and disclosure context that are incredibly easy to miss when relying on the default SEC workflow.
The Architecture
The platform is statically generated using Astro, ensuring blazing-fast load times. TypeScript acts as the crucial safety net, enforcing rigid data shapes when attempting to map the notoriously messy SEC JSON payloads. Because the adviser corpus doesn’t demand real-time, tick-by-tick updates for initial screening, static compilation provides a massive performance edge over heavy single-page applications.
What’s Next
While the current build solves the immediate pain of initial screening, the roadmap involves deepening the analytical value. The next evolution focuses on tighter change-tracking—alerting users when a specific adviser’s ADV materially changes year-over-year, saving analysts hours of manual text diffing.