The Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of the Investor Advocate is required by Congress to produce and submit two reports annually to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs of the Senate and the Committee on Financial Services of the House of Representatives.  This report covers the Office’s Report on Activities for the Fiscal Year 2025 and it is also the last report for the current Investor Advocate who will be leaving the SEC.  The Office is statutorily mandated to assist retail investors, identify problems investors may experience, analyze the impacts of rules or regulations, and make proposals to the SEC to promote investor interests.  The report highlights areas of focus.  During the year, the Office studied the private markets given their increasingly important role, engaged in ongoing research through the Office of Investor Research and issued a working paper in June 2025 on accredited investors and private market securities ownership, and considered the interplay between private and public markets.  Based on the accredited investor study, the Office ascertained that 12.6% of individuals in the U.S. population qualify as accredited investors.  Of these, 9.7% qualify based on their reported net worth, 2.8% qualify based on personal income, 2.8% qualify based on household income, and 1.7% qualify based on specialized expertise.  The majority of accredited investors (75%) satisfy only a single criterion, while the remaining 25% satisfy two or more criteria.  Approximately 4% of accredited investors who own private securities report their holdings as private funds.  The report, which provides a fair bit of data regarding the accredited investor population, can be found here.

The Office has focused on the quality and effectiveness of disclosures provided to investors, especially retail investors, and encouraged investor testing as a means of improving the accessibility of retail investor disclosures.

The report also includes a report from the Ombuds, which discusses investor complaints grouped into twelve primary issue categories.