Quantifying the Standard of Care

The investment industry must be held to the same scientific standards that protect Americans everywhere else.

Across America, the retirement savings of tens of millions of workers, retirees, and families are managed by an industry that is not required to measure the probability that those savings will be lost. Not disclose it. Not calculate it. Not even acknowledge that the tools to do so exist — and have existed for years.

TheFiduciaryMandate.org is where that changes. We are the gathering point for every regulator, legislator, attorney, investment professional, and institutional fiduciary who has looked at the evidence and reached the same conclusion: the investment industry must be held to the same scientific standards of risk measurement, disclosure, and accountability that protect Americans in medicine, aviation, engineering, and pharmaceutical regulation. This is not a partisan cause. It is a demand — grounded in evidence, backed by data, and driven by the conviction that the people who entrust their futures to this industry deserve to know the truth about the risks they face.

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Our Principles

What We Stand For

Principle 01
The science exists. The excuses do not.
The probability and magnitude of investment loss can be measured using public data and proven methods. The pharmaceutical industry solved a harder problem — measuring the effect of infinitely small quantities of chemicals on the infinite complexity of the human body — and is required to disclose the results. The investment industry’s claim that risk measurement “can’t be done” is not credible. It is the last refuge of an industry that profits from the gap between what it knows and what it tells.
Principle 02
Disclosure is the foundation.
Sunlight is the best of disinfectants. Before a single dollar of retirement savings is committed to a security, the person whose savings are at risk has a right to know the probability and expected magnitude of loss. This is not a radical demand. It is the minimum standard enforced in every other industry that manages consequential risk on behalf of the public.
Principle 03
Safety and profitability are the same goal.
Reducing losses does not reduce returns — it increases them. The fastest path to a better investment outcome is eliminating the preventable losses that force years of recovery. This is not philosophy. It is arithmetic.
Principle 04
Financial advice must earn the title of profession.
When a bridge fails, the engineer is accountable. When a drug causes harm, the manufacturer is accountable. When an advisor’s recommendation costs a retiree half their savings, accountability must follow — not for the market’s behavior, but for whether the advisor did the analytical work the standard requires.
Principle 05
The system must be reformed — not just the individuals within it.
Eighty-five percent of failures are deficiencies in the system, not the person. Fee structures that penalize prudence, research supply chains compromised by banking conflicts, examination rates that leave 85% of the industry unreviewed — these are system deficiencies. They require systemic solutions.
Principle 06
Retirees and working families come first.
The Americans with the most at stake and the least ability to recover — pension beneficiaries, 401(k) participants, IRA holders, public employees — are the people this initiative exists to protect. Their savings are not Wall Street’s raw material. They are the financial foundation of real lives.
Principle 07
Wall Street will not reform itself.
That is not speculation — it is history. The auto industry did not volunteer seatbelts. The tobacco industry did not volunteer warning labels. No industry in the history of American consumer protection has voluntarily adopted standards that reduced its revenue. The investment industry is not the exception. It is the rule.
Principle 08
This is every American’s cause.
Protecting retirement savings, pensions, 401(k)s, and IRAs is not a Republican priority or a Democratic priority. It is a universal one. We welcome every elected official, regulator, attorney, advisor, and citizen who believes the financial system should serve the people who depend on it — regardless of party, regardless of ideology, regardless of anything except the conviction that preventable harm to working Americans is unacceptable.