Skip to main content
Form ADV Part 2A Brochure Data is the structured reading of an investment adviser’s own Part 2A brochure — the plain-English document a firm files with the SEC describing its business. Each observation is one firm, identified by CRD, and every claim is stored next to the verbatim brochure sentence it was read from. The brochure layer is returned by the adviser profile endpoint alongside the firm’s Part 1 figures and its revealed 13F style.
Plan: Professional and above · Credits: 1 per call

​
What You Can Use ADV Brochure Data For

Classify a firm by what it actually does rather than by its name. Read a manager’s full fee schedule as printed, including tiered rates and performance-fee terms. Check whether a firm’s declared value or growth orientation matches what its 13F book holds. Quote a firm’s own sentence about its strategy, with a link to the brochure PDF it came from.

​
What the Adviser Profile Returns

The profile endpoint returns six layers for one firm. Identity and contact carries the legal and business name, full street address, phone, fax, website, and every e-mail found in the firm’s brochure — each address with the verbatim sentence it was printed in, so you can see whose mailbox it is. Declared business, from ADV Part 1, carries total and discretionary regulatory AUM, account and employee counts, non-US client share, private-fund flags and counts, services offered, and whether the firm charges performance fees. These are the firm’s self-reported numbers. Brochure profile is the Part 2A reading described below. Fees is the full fee schedule from the brochure. Revealed style is what the firm’s latest 13F book actually holds. Provenance carries the ADV snapshot date, the brochure date, the style report period, and the confidence of the CIK-to-CRD mapping.

​
Three Brochure Axes That Must Not Be Conflated

primary_type and subtype answer what kind of business the firm is. The ten primary types are asset_manager, wealth_manager, allocator, program_sponsor, dual_bd_ria, retirement_specialist, trust_company, insurance_affiliated, research_services and restricted_mandate. A subtype is always a child of one of them — hedge_fund and quant_systematic under asset_manager, family_office under wealth_manager, ocio under allocator, wrap_sponsor under program_sponsor. investment_strategy answers what the firm runs: tags such as long_short, merger_arbitrage, global_macro, distressed, venture_capital, asset_allocation, manager_selection. investment_style answers how it invests: management_approach (active versus passive), analysis_basis (fundamental versus quantitative), implementation_style (rules versus judgment), equity_styles, market_cap_focus, and the short-selling, leverage, derivatives, options and ESG flags. A quantitative arbitrage firm reads as quantitative and systematic on style while its strategy list names the arbitrages it runs. Those are two different facts and should be reported separately. Two further fields sit alongside: services_offered is what the firm sells to clients, and role_flags are facts that hold at the same time as primary_type — a wealth manager that is also a broker-dealer is still a wealth manager, and the flag records the second fact without displacing the first.

​
Brochure Classification Versus Part 1 Classification

primary_type and subtype are read from the brochure text. The directory row’s firm_type is a separate label derived from ADV Part 1 numbers, and only for 13F filers. They are two independent classifications. When they disagree, that is two classifications disagreeing — report both with their sources rather than picking one.

​
Why an Empty Brochure Field Does Not Mean No

Brochures are marketing documents, and the tags are deliberately conservative: a tag is set only where the brochure states the thing in so many words. An empty tag list, a value of unclear, or a null flag therefore means the brochure does not say. It never means the firm does not do it. uses_short_selling: false means the brochure states that it does not short — not that shorting went unmentioned. Because the tags are conservative, a brochure quote often says more than the tags captured. Quoting the sentence is always safe.

​
Reading the Brochure Fee Schedule

Every fee row leads with fee_text, the verbatim sentence the firm printed. The parsed columns beside it — rate and amount bounds, tiered schedules, performance-fee terms including high-water mark and hurdle — are a best-effort parse provided for filtering. When the parse and the sentence disagree, the sentence wins. A null fee column means the sentence does not say; it never means “no”. All rows are returned, tiers included.
Fee rows span every brochure the firm filed, not only the one described in the profile block. A large firm prices different products in different brochures — a wrap-fee brochure, an institutional brochure, a private-bank brochure — and each row names its own source in from_brochure and from_brochure_url, with from_this_brochure saying whether the block-level brochure_url is the right PDF for that row.Cite a fee with its own brochure. Rows from different brochures describe different products and are not alternatives for the same service, so never present the cheapest as “the” fee, and never compare across them without naming both brochures.

​
Which Brochure Answered

A firm can file many brochures. One brochure answers per firm, and the one describing the firm wins over the ones describing a single programme. brochure_scope says which kind answered: entity, business_line, supplement or undetermined. quotes carries the verbatim sentences behind the claims. Each quote’s topic names the field it supports, with its ADV item and page, and brochure_url links the PDF so any quote can be checked against the original.

​
Reading the Revealed 13F Style

For 13F filers, the profile also carries what the latest quarter’s book actually holds: vg_score, weighted price-to-book and price-to-earnings, top-ten concentration, effective holdings, sector mix and top holdings.
vg_score reads inverted: lower is growthier. Below 0.55 is deep growth, around 0.80 is blend, and 1.35 or above is deep value.
The 13F long US equity value is not the same number as regulatory AUM and the two should never be presented as alternatives. A firm can report roughly 570billionofregulatoryAUMagainstroughly570 billion of regulatory AUM against roughly 71 billion of 13F long US equity, because the two measure different things.
Together, the brochure profile and the revealed style answer the question neither answers alone: does this firm do what it says?

​
Brochure Coverage and Status

Brochure ingestion is still rolling out across the roster. When the brochure block is absent it carries a status giving the reason. on_file_not_processed means FocusAlpha holds the PDF and extraction is pending. not_in_store means no firm-level brochure is held — exempt reporting advisers often file none. Both mean “not ingested yet”, and neither means the firm discloses nothing. unavailable is a third and different case: the brochure store could not be read at that moment. Retry.

​
Query an Adviser Profile

Use the adviser profile endpoint with a CRD or CIK to retrieve all six layers for one firm.
​
string
required
crd:105247, cik:0001112520, or a bare number, which is tried as a CRD first and then as a CIK.
Quote e-mail addresses with their matches_firm flag. false usually means a parent-company or outsourced-compliance domain, which is often still the correct mailbox — say so when quoting it.
See also Form ADV Adviser Directory to find the firm, Adviser Screening to search these brochure axes across the whole roster, and 13F Institutional Holdings for the firm’s full position history.