To learn more about questions you can ask your investment professional to determine if they are the best fit for your long-term financial goals and needs, request this free guide.
Find the Right Adviser for You
There are over 16,000 adviser firms registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission.* Collectively, these firms serve over 56 million clients and manage over $144 trillion in assets. Investment advisers differ dramatically in size, structure and business practices, which may impact the quality of service they can provide. Because many may also be brokers and insurance agents, their incentives may not always align with your interests. Finding the right person to help with your investments can be difficult—but being aware of what sets investment advisers apart from one another is the first step to finding the right investment adviser for you.
How Many Choices Do You Have Across Broker, Investment Adviser and Insurance Industries?
- Broker Industry: 3,298 Firms / 628,392 Brokers
- Investment Adviser Industry: 16,044 Firms / 376,535 IARs (Investment Adviser Representatives)
- Insurance Industry: 5,965 Firms / 3.0+ Million Insurance Agents
Fisher Investments Is Unique Within the Investment Adviser Industry.
At Fisher Investments, we don’t employ brokers or insurance agents. Our only fee is based on the value of the assets we manage for you—helping align our interests with yours. Our size and scale provide us more opportunities to serve you that may not be available to smaller firms. We design a personalized strategy based on your financial situation and long-term investment goals.
Fisher Investments Is Unique Long Description
This is a funnel chart with five horizontal bars, each narrower than the last, illustrating how the population of Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) shrinks as additional filtering criteria are applied. Each bar shows a percentage of the original 100% total, along with a label describing the criteria and the resulting number of firms.
- 100% — The starting point, representing the full universe of RIAs.
- 62% (9,951 RIAs) — Firms that have no brokers or insurance agents on staff.
- 19% (2,976 RIAs) — Firms that have no brokers or insurance agents, and manage at least $100 million in assets under management (AUM), with at least 100 clients.
- 3% (455 RIAs) — Firms that have no brokers or insurance agents, and manage at least $1 billion in AUM, with at least 500 clients.
- 0.02% (4 RIAs) — Firms that have no brokers or insurance agents, and manage at least $100 billion in AUM, with at least 20,000 clients. An arrow points from this final bar to the Fisher Investments logo, indicating that Fisher Investments is one of only four firms nationwide meeting this highest tier of criteria.
The chart visually emphasizes scale by using progressively shorter dark green bars (matching the shrinking percentages) paired with light gray background bars representing the full width, so the reader can see just how small each successive segment becomes relative to the whole.
*Source: Broker Industry: Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), https://www.finra.org/media-center/statistics; Insurance Industry: (Insurance Agents) Insurance Information Institute, https://www.statista.com/statistics/194233/aggregate-number-of-insurance-employees-in-the-us/#statisticContainer as of 2024, (Firms) Insurance Information Institute, https://www.statista.com/statistics/194335/total-number-of-life-insurance-companies-in-the-us/ ; RIA industry: information on registered investment advisers downloaded from https://www.sec.gov/data-research/sec-markets-data/information-about-registered-investment-advisers-exempt-reporting-advisers as of 04/24/2025 and only includes firms that are registered with the SEC, not including state-registered firms.
Take the Next Step
So, how do you choose the right investment adviser? With thousands of firms differing in size, structure and incentives, identifying the right fit can be difficult. You can better assess different financial professionals by learning the right questions to ask. When evaluating a money manager, we recommend hitting these seven essential topics.
