Aletheus — ask the archive

Try: find goldman sachs · tell me about firm 361 · when did crd 7506 leave · what aum did crd 361 report · how many advisers in november 2013 · list the snapshots · what can you answer

You asked: “what can you answer”

What this page answers

intents

capabilities: What this layer answers, what it refuses, and what it will not serve.
firm search: Find a firm by name, CRD, CIK or SEC file number. Answers up to 25 firms in CRD order and refuses rather than truncating beyond that. Finding a firm establishes nothing about it.
firm record: One firm's roster record, addressed by exact CRD only — never a name search. Fields as filed; filed is not verified.
firm history: When one named firm appears in the rosters: first seen, last seen, the names it filed under, and — if it left — the WINDOW it left in. Disappearance is not evidence of anything by itself.
firm size history: One named firm's reported AUM and accounts across snapshots, in date order. Dated statements from its own filings, not its size today. No cross-firm version of this question exists.
roster size: How many advisers a named snapshot lists — the SEC file's declared count and the archive's stored count, stated separately.
snapshot dates: Every roster file in the archive with its date, firm count and source filename — the provenance behind every other answer.
departures: Firms present in one named snapshot and absent from a later one, in CRD order, capped and counted before the answer is built. Absence is a window, never a date and never a cause.

refusals

empty question: An empty question is not a wildcard — it asks nothing and matches nothing. Ask one of the question shapes this layer answers.
not understood: This layer answers a fixed set of question shapes, and this is not one of them. It will not guess: a best-effort reading that runs the wrong query is a wrong answer about a real firm. The shapes it answers are listed under this_layer_can_answer.
comparison: That question asks for firms ordered by a measure — most, biggest, worst, top, sorted-by. Nothing on this surface is ordered by any measure of a firm or presented as a comparison: a measured ordering of named firms is the shape this project rejected as a public accusation engine, and the refusal is structural, not a threshold. Ask about one named firm instead.
discipline: This layer serves no disciplinary field. The archive's two Form ADV disclosure columns contradict each other on a material share of rows, and served in bulk they are a firm-level misconduct table — one export away from a public naming database. The per-firm disclosure record exists for an operator on the lookup surface, where the conflicting-record refusal travels with it. It is not served here.
bulk: That asks for the roster itself. There is no export, no dump, no paging, and no way to walk the archive through this surface — a cap is a refusal, not a page size. Ask about one named firm, or ask how many firms a snapshot lists.
individuals: The archive behind this layer has no person rows at all — it lists firms. Nothing here can say anything about a named individual, and this project keeps no roster of named individuals.
cause: The records cannot show that. No roster row says why a firm left — every status value in the archive is an approval, and no terminated, withdrawn or revoked status exists in it. Leaving the roster is ordinary — an acquisition, or a move to state registration below the SEC threshold — and is not evidence of anything by itself. This layer can state the window a firm left in, never the reason.
query too short: A name search needs at least 3 characters. One or two letters match most of the archive, which is an export rather than a search. An identifier — CRD, CIK, or SEC file number — is exact and has no minimum.
unsearchable: That question's search text has no letters or digits. Punctuation alone is not a wildcard here and matches nothing.
too many matches: That matches more firms than one answer may describe. Add words, or ask by CRD, CIK or SEC file number. This is a cap on the answer, not a page of a longer list: there is no paging, and no way to walk the roster through this surface.
ambiguous firm: More than one roster entry matches that name, and look-alikes are never merged — a wrong join is a false statement about a real business. The candidates follow in CRD order; re-ask by CRD.
not in archive: No firm matching that appears in any roster snapshot this archive holds. That is a statement about this archive on its stated dates, not about whether the firm exists.
unknown date: No roster snapshot carries that date. Snapshots are monthly with real gaps — none at all in 2024 — so a date between snapshots is a date the archive holds nothing for. The nearest snapshots are named alongside this refusal.
date order: The first date must be an earlier snapshot than the second.
archive unavailable: The roster archive is not usable at this path — missing, empty, or lacking the firm table — so nothing was searched, which says nothing about any firm.

not exposed

disclosure fields: The archive holds two Form ADV disclosure columns. They are not served here at any result size, and they contradict each other on a material share of rows.
individuals: No representative, no person, no name of anyone. The archive behind this layer has no person rows at all.
orderings: Results are returned in a fixed identifier order. Nothing on this surface is ranked, scored, sorted by any measure of a firm, or presented as a comparison.
bulk: No dump, no export, no paging, no cursor.
analysis: Nothing is computed, weighted or concluded. Fields as filed, and the dates they were filed on.

Archive: 199 roster snapshots, 2006-06-05 to 2026-10-02; the latest lists 17210 firms (ia09012026.csv). Every answer describes the archive as of the latest snapshot above. A firm that registered or deregistered since is not in it yet.

Source, limits, and what this archive cannot show

source

dataset: SEC Form ADV investment-adviser firm roster
publisher: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
retrieved from: https://adviserinfo.sec.gov/ (IAPD), monthly published roster files
redistribution: Works of the United States Government carry no U.S. copyright (17 U.S.C. 105(a)). These roster files were served to the public, free of charge, by the SEC's own public website. Cite the SEC as the source. No SEC seal, logo or artwork is reproduced here, and IARD is a registered service mark of its owner.
what it is: One row per firm per monthly roster snapshot, as filed. Nothing here is computed, weighted, scored or ranked.

limits

max firms per answer

min name query characters

fields never served

discipline_any
discipline_kinds
phone

ordering

Results are returned in a fixed identifier order. Nothing on this surface is ranked, scored, sorted by any measure of a firm, or presented as a comparison.

paging

None. No cursor, offset or page parameter exists, so there is no way to walk past the cap.

cannot show

What this archive CANNOT show: it is a registration roster, not a conduct record. It does not show what any firm or person did, whether anyone was harmed, whether a complaint was ever made, what a firm charged, or anything about any individual representative. A firm leaving the roster is ordinary — an acquisition, or a move to state registration below the SEC threshold — and is not evidence of anything by itself.

retrieved

2026-10-16

What this page answers: finding a firm by name, CRD, CIK or SEC file number; one firm’s roster record, its span across the rosters, and its own reported AUM and accounts over time; how many advisers a named snapshot lists; and the archive’s own provenance — every roster file with its date and source filename. What it refuses, always: anything ordered by a measure of a firm, anything about discipline or conduct, anything about an individual person, any cause or reason for a change, and any answer bigger than twenty-five firms. A misspelled firm name comes back with up to five similar names drawn from the archive’s own index, for you to re-ask — never a corrected search run on your behalf, and never a ranking.

Answers come from public SEC records. They describe what was filed, not whether anyone did anything wrong, and they are not legal advice. Automated retrieval and analysis may be inaccurate or incomplete — verify anything that matters against the cited source documents before relying on any answer. The archive is a registration roster, not a conduct record: a firm leaving it is ordinary, and is not evidence of anything by itself.