Two investors can lose the same amount in the same product and hold completely different claims, because the answer depends on who advised them, in what capacity, and which agreement they signed. This page explains the difference. You do not need to work it out before calling.
Identifying the responsible party is not a formality. It decides the legal standard that applies to what was done to you, the forum where the dispute is heard, and often whether there is an institution with resources standing behind the individual.
Most investors cannot answer the question from memory, and that is normal. The title on a business card rarely tells you how someone was registered, and many professionals hold more than one registration at once. The answer is in the paperwork: the account agreement, the advisory agreement, the disclosure documents, and the public registration records. Reading those is the first hour of any case review.
The traditional case. A registered representative recommended or executed transactions in a brokerage account. Under Regulation Best Interest, a recommendation must be in your best interest at the time it is made, considering your objectives, your risk tolerance, and your need for access to your money. Excessive trading, unauthorized transactions, misrepresentation, and concentration all live here.
Advisers are held to a fiduciary duty, the highest standard the law imposes on a financial professional. It runs to the whole relationship rather than to a single transaction, and it covers conflicts, compensation, and the ongoing management of the account. Fee abuse, undisclosed conflicts, unsuitable portfolio construction, and neglected managed accounts belong to this branch.
Many professionals are registered as brokers and as investment adviser representatives at the same time, often at affiliated firms. The standard that applies depends on the capacity in which they were acting when the recommendation was made, and the paperwork frequently makes that harder to see, not easier. A single relationship can produce claims on both sides of the line, in two different forums.
Sometimes the misconduct is in the offering itself rather than in the advice. Private placements, funds, and program interests are sold on documents that must disclose what the investment actually is and what can go wrong. Where those documents misstate or omit what mattered, the sponsor and the selling firm may both bear responsibility, and the selling firm had an independent duty to investigate before offering it to you.
In fraud cases where the person who took the money is gone, the question becomes who else was in the chain. Brokerages and banks that processed transfers carrying visible warning signs, sudden large wires overseas, repeated transfers to unfamiliar platforms, out of pattern liquidations in a retirement account, may bear responsibility for what their own systems flagged and no one acted on. This is a developing area, and whether a claim exists depends heavily on the specific facts.
Describing what happened is enough. Identifying who was responsible, under which standard, in which forum, is the work of the case review, and it is my job rather than yours. Bring the statements and the agreements, or bring nothing but the story, and we will start there.
Public registration records show how a professional was licensed and where. FINRA's BrokerCheck covers brokers and their firms; the SEC's Investment Adviser Public Disclosure database covers advisers. Many professionals appear in both, which is itself informative.
The agreements decide the forum. A brokerage account agreement almost always sends disputes to FINRA arbitration. An advisory agreement usually names AAA or JAMS instead, in a clause most clients never read. Which one governs your claim is a question of documents, not of preference.
The account records show what was actually done. Statements, confirmations, disclosure documents, and the firm's own correspondence establish the pattern, and in most cases the paper trail settles the question long before anyone argues about it. How the arbitration process works
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