Every SEC Marketing Rule enforcement action, indexed

The SEC's Marketing Rule (17 CFR § 275.206(4)-1) reached its compliance date on November 4, 2022. In the three-plus years since, the Division of Examinations has published four risk alerts, the Division of Investment Management staff have issued roughly forty FAQs, and Enforcement has brought a small but pointed series of cases that establish the contours of what advisers can — and cannot — say in public.

This page is a running ledger of every public Marketing Rule enforcement action we're aware of, with the specific advertising language that drew the cite, the penalty, and the lesson examiners almost certainly want the rest of the industry to learn. We'll update it as new cases are filed; if we've missed one, tell us.

The pattern, in one sentence

If your firm published hypothetical or backtested performance on a public surface — a website, a LinkedIn post, an email blast — without first adopting policies that limit hypothetical performance to an audience whose financial situation you can verify, you are squarely in the SEC's line of sight. Every enforcement action under the new rule, with one exception below, has involved this fact pattern. Testimonial-disclosure failures and SEC-endorsement implications are catching up fast as secondary themes, but hypothetical performance is the gateway issue.

Titan was the SEC's first standalone enforcement action under the new Marketing Rule, and remains the largest by dollar amount as of this writing. The agency charged that between the November 2022 compliance date and August 2023, Titan published “annualized” performance figures on its website that were, in substance, hypothetical: they showed returns the firm's strategies would havegenerated if extrapolated from short live-trading periods, presented in a way the SEC said a reasonable investor could mistake for actual realized returns.

The deeper failure was procedural. Rule 206(4)-1(d)(6) does not prohibithypothetical performance — it conditions it on policies and procedures the adviser must adopt and follow before disseminating it. Among other things, the adviser must be able to show that the audience for the hypothetical performance has the financial situation, knowledge, and resources to evaluate it. A public-facing website doesn't satisfy that condition by definition.

Titan also drew separate charges for compliance, custody, and recordkeeping issues — the Marketing Rule was the marquee count but not the only one. The firm settled without admitting or denying the findings.

A year after Titan, the SEC announced settled charges against nine separate registered investment advisers for advertising hypothetical performance on their public websites without the policies and procedures Rule 206(4)-1(d)(6) requires. Total civil penalties came to roughly $1.24 million, divided among the firms based on the size and duration of the offending content. Individual penalties ranged from five figures to a few hundred thousand each.

The sweep's significance was not the dollar total. It was the breadth: nine firms in one announcement signaled that the SEC had finished writing the playbook on the Titan case and was now applying it programmatically. The agency's description of the violations was nearly identical across firms — websites with annualized or projected return charts, no documented eligibility-verification process, no required disclosures of the criteria and assumptions used to generate the figures.

Meridian is the first Marketing Rule enforcement action brought under SEC Chair Paul Atkins, who took over from Gary Gensler in April 2025. The penalty was modest, but the timing was the point: a new administration bringing a Marketing Rule case within its first six months tells the industry the rule is not getting deprioritized — and the theme of the case (a firm whose website said one thing and whose Form ADV said another) is one any examiner can detect with a thirty-second cross-check.

The substance of the violation was a website statement about the firm's services and fees that was inconsistent with the firm's most recent Form ADV Part 2A brochure. Under Rule 206(4)-1(a)(1), an advertisement may not include any untrue statement of material fact or omit a fact necessary in order to make the statement made not misleading. Misalignment between marketing copy and the firm's most authoritative public disclosure document fits squarely.

What enforcement is likely to bring next

The Division of Examinations published a fourth risk alert in December 2025 (our breakdown) that closed with one of the most direct sentences the staff has written: “Repeat findings will be referred to Enforcement.” That sentence is a roadmap. The findings the alert highlighted are the cases the staff is watching for next:

• Testimonials and endorsements without the four required disclosures. Specifically: client/non-client status, compensation (cash or non-cash), material conflicts, and the “clear and prominent” placement requirement at time of dissemination. Hyperlinked disclosures — “disclosures available at firm.com/disclosures” — do not satisfy this. (See Rule 206(4)-1(b)(1)(i)(A).)
• Third-party ratings used without due diligence.The alert identified specific “common sense” due-diligence steps the staff expects (review the methodology, obtain the questionnaires, get representations from the rating provider) and called out advisers who skipped them. (See Rule 206(4)-1(c).)
• Compensating ineligible (statutorily disqualified) persons for testimonials and endorsements, including in some state-action contexts the staff read more broadly than the industry expected. (See Rule 206(4)-1(b)(4).)
• Affiliation between the adviser and the promoternot made “readily apparent” at the time of the endorsement — the undisclosed-affiliation case the staff effectively pre-announced.

Translated: the next wave of enforcement is unlikely to be hypothetical performance. The SEC has built that case file. The next wave is the testimonial column, the third-party rating column, and the affiliation column — the precise findings the December alert called out by name. Firms that read that alert as guidance, not warning, are misreading it.

What a small firm should do this quarter

Three concrete things, in priority order:

1. Audit every public surface for hypothetical-performance language. Website, blog archive, downloadable PDFs (one-pagers, fact sheets, pitch decks that ever lived behind a public link), LinkedIn company page posts, founder's personal LinkedIn if used to discuss firm strategies, archived email campaigns. Any “model,” “backtested,” “hypothetical,” “projected,” or annualized-from-a-short-period figure is a liability. Either move it behind a verified-eligibility wall or take it down.
2. Walk every testimonial through the four-disclosure checklist. Client status, compensation, material conflicts, clear-and-prominent placement at time of dissemination. If a disclosure lives at the bottom of a page or behind “Important disclosures” link, it doesn't count.
3. Reconcile website to Form ADV.Item 5 of Part 1A (AUM bands) and Item 5 of Part 2A (fees) are the two highest-frequency mismatch points. Examiners run this check first because it's cheap and almost always finds something.

Educational summary — not legal advice. Always read the original SEC release and the underlying rule text. Safe to Publish is not a law firm. See Terms.