advice-standards

advice-standards is a skill for Claude Code from JoelLewis/finance_skills. It costs 161 tokens per session (5,769 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to deciding whether a product or communication counts as regulated investment advice under the U.S. Investment Advisers Act.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess fintech features, AI assistants, publications, or other services that discuss securities or recommend investing, buying, or selling them. Current rules should be verified with official sources.
Why use it?
It helps separate general financial education from advice that may require investment-adviser registration.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the compliance plugin — 17 skills shipped together

not rated 184repo +5 1mo ago A scan Socket: passSnyk: passSkillSpector: pass 161 tokens original MIT

Good fit Use it to assess fintech features, AI assistants, publications, or other services that discuss securities or recommend investing, buying, or selling them. Current rules should be verified with official sources.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/joellewis/finance_skills/advice-standards
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add JoelLewis/finance_skills --skill advice-standards
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JoelLewis/finance_skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install compliance, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 17 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for advice-standards

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/joellewis/finance_skills/advice-standards/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/joellewis/finance_skills/advice-standards)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/joellewis/finance_skills/advice-standards"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/joellewis/finance_skills/advice-standards/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for advice-standards

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/joellewis/finance_skills/advice-standards"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/joellewis/finance_skills/advice-standards.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 161 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,769 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 18 Mar 2026
  • Snyk pass 18 Mar 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00161 $0.05769
Opus 5 $0.00081 $0.02884
Sonnet 5 $0.00032 $0.01154
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00577

Measured 11d ago against content hash 4d9befb537bd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

advice-standards scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/compliance/skills/advice-standards/SKILL.md · 187 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 187 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Investment Advice Standards & Regulatory Boundaries

Regulatory status current as of June 2026 — verify effective dates, dollar thresholds, and pending rulemakings against current SEC/FINRA/FinCEN sources before advising.

Core Concepts

The Statutory Definition: Investment Advisers Act Section 202(a)(11)

Under Section 202(a)(11) of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 (15 U.S.C. Section 80b-2(a)(11)), an "investment adviser" is any person who, for compensation, engages in the business of advising others, either directly or through publications or writings, as to the value of securities or as to the advisability of investing in, purchasing, or selling securities. The SEC applies a three-prong test, all of which must be satisfied:

  1. Advice prong: The person provides advice, counsel, analyses, or reports concerning securities. This is interpreted broadly. It includes recommendations about specific securities, asset classes, portfolio construction, and the advisability of investing in securities generally.

  2. Business prong: The advice is provided as part of a regular business activity. This does not require that advising be the person's primary business — it need only be a regular, and not isolated, activity. The SEC has stated that even a single instance of advice can satisfy this prong if the person holds themselves out as providing advisory services. See SEC Release IA-1092 (1987).

  3. Compensation prong: The person receives compensation for the advice. Compensation is construed broadly and need not be a separate, direct fee for advisory services. It can include commissions, transaction-based compensation, soft dollars, or any economic benefit received in connection with the advisory activity. Receiving compensation for a bundled service that includes advice satisfies this prong.

All three prongs must be met. However, the SEC applies each prong broadly, making the exclusions and safe harbors critically important in practice.

The SEC's Functional Test: Substance Over Form

The SEC evaluates the advice question functionally, not formally. What matters is what a person or platform actually does, not how it labels its services. Calling a service "education," "information," or "tools" does not immunize it from being classified as investment advice if the substance of the communication is advisory in nature. See SEC v. Capital Gains Research Bureau, Inc., 375 U.S. 180 (1963) (establishing the broad, remedial purpose of the Advisers Act).

Read the full file on GitHub · 187 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 187 lines · 161 tokens per session scan A 4d9befb537bd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

advice-standards is a skill published in the GitHub repository JoelLewis/finance_skills (184 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 161 tokens to every session and 5,769 once invoked, about $0.0008 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

fiscaliste

Fiscaliste IA pour la fiscalité personnelle des particuliers français : optimisation et déclaration de l'impôt sur le revenu, IFI, revenus du capital, revenus fonciers, equity salarial, crypto-actifs et PER. Couvre le calcul de l'IR (barème, quotient familial, décote, PAS, CEHR, revenus exceptionnels), la déclaration…

romainsimon/paperasse · 302 tokens

controleur-fiscal

Inspecteur des finances publiques IA. Simule un contrôle fiscal DGFIP complet sur les comptes d'une entreprise française (SASU, EURL, SAS, SARL). Analyse le FEC, la liasse fiscale, les charges déduites, le compte courant d'associé, la TVA, l'IS selon 8 axes de vérification. Identifie les chefs de redressement…

romainsimon/paperasse · 136 tokens

commissaire-aux-comptes

Commissaire aux comptes IA pour l'audit des comptes annuels d'entreprises françaises. Applique la démarche NEP en 7 phases : prise de connaissance, contrôle du FEC, vérification du bilan, du compte de résultat, de la balance, de la liasse fiscale, et contrôles transversaux. Émet une opinion motivée sur la fiabilité…

romainsimon/paperasse · 123 tokens

hr-payroll

Help HR operations specialists, payroll administrators, and compensation teams understand, design, and run payroll processing, compliance, and payroll-related HR operations. Use when asked to set up a payroll process, run a payroll compliance audit, design a payroll calendar, handle a payroll discrepancy, build a…

tuanductran/hr-skills · 88 tokens

hr-retirement-benefits

Help compensation and benefits teams design, communicate, and administer retirement and pension benefits. Use when asked to design our retirement benefit offering, explain 401(k)/pension options to employees, compare retirement plan providers, communicate a retirement plan change, or help an employee understand their…

tuanductran/hr-skills · 63 tokens

tax-calendar-proactive

A proactive tax calendar for Russian individual entrepreneurs and small limited companies. From a few business details, it identifies upcoming deadlines, estimated payments, and important thresholds such as VAT and the simplified-tax-system limit.

ilyautov/small-business-ru · 167 tokens