About Us
Welcome to Investor.gov!
Brought to you by the SEC’s Office of Investor Education and Advocacy, Investor.gov is your online resource to help you make sound investment decisions and avoid fraud. Please take a minute to view our video below to see how Investor.gov can help you.
The SEC's Office of Investor Education and Advocacy (OIEA) is dedicated to serving the needs of individual investors. It has three functional units:
The Office of Investor Education carries out the SEC’s investor education program, which includes producing and distributing educational materials, leading educational seminars and investor-oriented events, and partnering with federal agencies, state regulators, consumer groups and self-regulatory organizations on investor literacy initiatives.
The Office of Investor Assistance responds to questions, complaints, and suggestions from the members of the public. The Office handles investment-related complaints and questions from tens of thousands of individual investors and others every year. Investors may contact us through our online complaint forms or question form, or our hotline, (800) SEC-0330 (toll-free in the U.S.) to ask questions on a wide range of securities-related topics, to complain about problems with their investments or their financial professionals, or to suggest improvements to the agency's regulations and procedures.
The Office of the Chief Counsel creates educational materials on securities-related topics for the public (including for Investor.gov, the SEC's website designed for individual investors) and provides advice to OIEA on securities and administrative law issues.
If investors have complaints regarding a broker or investment adviser, we will contact the company or individual to find out what happened. Sometimes, this results in a satisfactory resolution of the complaint. Other times, it's unclear who is right and who is wrong. In that case, we let investors know their legal options and how they can pursue a resolution on their own. Read here for more information on how we handle investor complaints.
Our specialists also research and provide information on a range of topics, such as whether a broker or investment professional is properly licensed to do business, or whether a company is registered with the SEC.
We cannot tell investors what investments to make, but we can provide them with unbiased information on investment decisions and on protecting themselves from securities fraud or abuse.
