Guides › Vetting a Financial Advisor
Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: a warning sign you cannot verify is just an anxiety. Each of the twelve below is paired with the exact place the answer lives — a numbered Form ADV Part 2A item, Form CRS, or the public disclosure record — so that thirty minutes of reading turns a bad feeling into a finding or clears it. Advisers must give you the ADV brochure and Form CRS; the databases are free. Nothing here requires you to confront anyone.
Flags about money
1. You cannot get the fee in writing. Check: Form ADV Part 2A Item 5.A, which requires the adviser to “provide your fee schedule” and to “disclose whether the fees are negotiable.” If the brochure has a schedule and your adviser will not restate it for your account, that gap is the finding. 2. “Fee-only,” but there are products involved. Check: Item 5.E — an adviser whose supervised persons accept compensation for selling investment products must disclose it there, and Item 5.E.3 requires a firm earning more than half its advisory revenue from commissions to say that commissions are its primary or exclusive compensation. Cross-check Item 10.A (registered as a broker-dealer or a registered representative of one) and Item 10.C.8 (an insurance company or agency affiliation). The full distinction. 3. You were never told they are paid to recommend other advisers or managers. Check: Item 10.D. 4. Someone was paid to send you there. Check: Item 14.B, which requires disclosure of compensation to anyone who is not a supervised person for client referrals — not automatically a problem, but you are entitled to know. 5. Trading commissions buying the adviser research or services. Check: Item 12.A.1, soft-dollar benefits, which the instructions require be disclosed along with the incentive they create.
Flags about control of your money
6. Your statements come from the adviser, not from a custodian. The most serious flag on this list. Check: Item 15 requires an adviser with custody to explain that you will receive statements from the qualified custodian and to urge you to compare those with any statements the adviser sends. Two independent statements that reconcile is the whole protection; one statement from one source is not. 7. Discretionary trading you do not remember granting. Check: Item 16, which requires disclosure of discretionary authority and the procedures followed before assuming it. 8. Recommendations that are all in-house products. Check: Item 10.C.2 (affiliation with an investment company or pooled vehicle) and Item 11.B, which covers recommending securities in which the adviser has a material financial interest. 9. A performance fee on one account and an asset fee on another. Check: Item 6, which requires the side-by-side conflict to be explained — the incentive to favour the performance-fee account.
Flags about the person and the process
10. Disclosure events you had to find yourself. Check: BrokerCheck and IAPD, plus Item 9 of the brochure, where legal and disciplinary events are presumed material for ten years. Read the status before you react — how to read what you find. 11. Fiduciary status that is warm in conversation and absent in writing. Check: Form CRS must state the legal standard of conduct and whether the firm and its professionals are dually registered — the five-minute verification. 12. Urgency, or any suggestion that a market return is assured. Check: the brochure’s own Item 8 must describe methods of analysis, investment strategies and risk of loss. A document the adviser filed describing how you can lose money, next to a conversation implying you cannot, is a contradiction you can hold in your hand. Deadline pressure to sign is its own answer.
What to do with what you find
If it clears: good, and you now know the document better than most clients ever will. If it does not: ask, in writing, and keep the reply — the ADV and Form CRS request email is a neutral way to start. If the answer is unsatisfying, get a second opinion before you do anything drastic, and if you decide to leave, it is paperwork rather than a confrontation: how to fire a financial advisor, the termination letter, and the prorated refund you may be owed. Before hiring the next one: the twenty-minute vet and the fifteen questions.
A flag you can check is worth ten you can only worry about.
If the checks above came back badly, the next step is meeting someone else — not confronting anyone. The matching service below introduces you to advisers who pay to meet you.
Before you start, what actually happens. The form is run by Kapitalwise, our advisor-matching partner. It asks about nine questions — age, investable assets, location — then your name, email and phone number, and verifies the phone by text.
Kapitalwise sends your details to advisers who pay for the introduction, so expect calls and texts. Clear Money Guide is paid when you submit the form, whether or not you ever hire anyone. Nothing loads and nothing reaches Kapitalwise until you press the button.
Compare fees, scope, conflicts, credentials and fiduciary duty before you hire anyone.
The Kapitalwise form opens here — you stay on this page.