09/03/2026
New York Times reporter Benjamen Mullin revealed that the founder of Shook Research — the firm that produces the advisor rankings Forbes publishes — had paid a top Forbes editor $6 million. The editor failed to disclose the payment to his superiors and was fired. Forbes' famous "Top Advisor" rankings have been suspended. Some of the country's largest wealth-advisory firms have since withdrawn their participation.
Everyone's calling that the scandal. It is — but it is not the reason investors should view any "Best Advisor" ranking with a high dose of skepticism. That reason is simpler: these lists are big revenue generators for financial media. The outlets that publish advisor rankings sell readers on their impartiality — but a closer look at the business model casts serious doubt on it.
Start with the fine print that, for any reader who bothers to look closely, makes clear that investment performance is not a criterion.
Read that again. The ranking a financial advisor hangs on their wall, or highlights on their website, does not measure how well they've managed anyone's money. And the rankings never claimed to measure their investment performance. The rankings weigh, among other criteria, assets under management, the revenue an advisor generates for their firm, tenure, and "best practices" gathered in interviews.
So ask why you've even heard of these lists. The firms ranked highly tend to be the firms that manage more money than those at the lower end of the rankings — and the larger firms tend to have larger marketing budgets that buy advertising that puts that ranking in front of you, on every ad, every mailer, every airport wall. So the ranking you recognize isn't necessarily the most rigorous — it's the most advertised.
Now the sleight of hand. You cannot pay to be ranked — the publishers say so, and I'll grant it in full. But the moment an advisor is named in the rankings, they are eligible to pay licensing fees to the publisher: thousands of dollars to display that ranking across their website, marketing, plaques, and logos. A self-proclaimed impartial ranking turns into a revenue stream from the ranked firm to the 'impartial' publisher.
So the ranking isn't the product. It's the bait. The product is the marketing license the publisher sells to the ranked firm. And the more assets a firm gathers, the more it can afford to buy the right to broadcast its own ranking.
This is the conflict of interest, and it is blatant: the outlet publishing the ranking is paid by the very firms it ranks. Whoever's revenue depends on the party they are judging cannot be the impartial judge of them. Not because anyone is dishonest — because of where the money comes from. Impartiality becomes a marketing claim, not a fact.
And this isn't one rogue publisher — it's the model across the category. As print advertising collapsed, the major financial titles reached for advisor rankings, events, and awards to replace the lost revenue, and they monetize those lists the same way: licensing the badge back to the firms named on it. Forbes and Barron's both do it. The badge-for-sale isn't an exception someone slipped in. It's the business. The payment the Times uncovered was an outlier — but it should push regulators to confront the conflict of interest built into how the rankings industry sells its lists.
None of this breaks any laws or regulations designed to protect the investing public. That's the point. The conflict isn't the scandal — it's the structure the scandal exposed: financial media produce rankings that pose as a skill credential — one that, by design, excludes objective skill — disclosed only in fine print that virtually no one ever reads.
Impartiality must be structural, not a slogan. The person managing your portfolio should not be the one reporting its performance. And the party profiting from a ranking should never be the one deciding what it measures. These are clear conflicts of interest.
