Judy Diamond Associates: Prospector, Pricing, and a Fair Comparison

Source: Judy Diamond store (store-listed, observed 2026-09-13).

Judy Diamond is the name people type when they have decided to get serious about 401(k) prospecting, and for good reason — it has been doing this job longer than almost anything else in the category. Here's the thing: most pages about it are either sales copy or a competitor's hatchet job, and neither tells you what you actually came to find out. So this one is organized around the five things people search alongside the brand — the Prospector product, the cost, the login, the "Judy Diamond report," and the plan list — with a source URL and an observation date on every factual claim. We build a competing product. Judge us by whether the citations hold up.

What is Judy Diamond's Retirement Plan Prospector?

Retirement Plan Prospector+ is a searchable database built on Form 5500 filings, aimed squarely at advisors and wholesalers selling into the retirement plan market. Its own product page states it gives you "Access 800,000+ retirement plans using 500+ advanced search fields" and organizes the product around three stages — identify leads, close leads, and strategic analysis.

Source: judydiamond.com/products/retirement-plan-prospector/ (as published, observed 2026-09-13).

The published feature set, quoted from that same page, is substantive and worth listing plainly rather than paraphrasing into vagueness:

• Red Flags — "over a dozen plan characteristics that indicate possible problems in a plan's design or administration."
• Plan Score Card — "evaluate a plan's design and performance against other plans in the country, state, same industry or with similar asset levels or participant counts."
• Detailed Plan Financials — "find out how a plan's performance has changed for key metrics in the past one, three and five years."
• Performance-based Benchmarking — benchmark a sponsor against custom peer groups across metrics.
• Pre-generated Talking Points — "plain English description of how to address identified issues."
• Dynamic Marketing Letters — approach letters that pull the plan's own data in.
• Graphic-Rich Report Builder, Map-Based Insights, and CRM-Friendly Export.

That is a genuinely full workflow — identification, benchmarking, meeting prep, and outreach material in one place. Anyone telling you Judy Diamond is "just a list" has not read the product page. The honest gap is elsewhere, and we will get to it.

How much does Judy Diamond cost?

Unusually for this category, real dollars are published, in a public store you can read without a sales call. Here is exactly what the store listed when we checked:

Source: store.judydiamond.com — Retirement Plan Prospector (store-listed, observed 2026-09-13). The store's own instruction reads "To order a single user account for a state, regional or national subscription…" — so these are per-seat prices, which matters if you are pricing a team.

Separately, the company's product page lists the retirement product as "Starting as low as $750 annually" for group retirement plan sales and marketing professionals. Source: Retirement Plan Prospector product page (as published, read 2026-10-05). One caution worth stating plainly: the entry-price language on the marketing pages and the SKU prices in the store do not line up neatly. Quote whichever you were shown, get the term and seat count in writing, and confirm the current number before you budget. Prices change; this page is a dated snapshot, not a quote.

Who owns Judy Diamond Associates now?

This has changed, and a lot of pages on the internet — including an earlier version of this one — still have it wrong. Judy Diamond is no longer attributed to ALM. Every page on judydiamond.com now carries the footer "© 2026 Touchpoint Markets." Source: judydiamond.com/order-now/ footer (observed 2026-09-13). Touchpoint Markets was in turn acquired by Arc in July 2025. Source: arc-network.com — Arc Acquires Touchpoint Markets (as published 1 July 2025).

One precision note, because we would rather be exact than tidy: Arc's own announcement lists the acquired brand portfolio without naming Judy Diamond Associates specifically. The link between the two is established by Judy Diamond's own site footer, which is primary and sufficient — but it is a two-step chain rather than a single press release, and you should know that if you plan to repeat it.

What is a "Judy Diamond report" — and what about the 5500 report?

Two different things get called this, and conflating them causes real confusion, so separate them.

The in-product plan report. Inside Prospector+, the Plan Score Card, Red Flags, Detailed Plan Financials, and the Graphic-Rich Report Builder produce a per-plan document built from that plan's most recent Form 5500 — the thing an advisor prints and carries into a sponsor meeting. Source: judydiamond.com/products/retirement-plan-prospector/ (observed 2026-09-13). When an advisor says "run me a Judy Diamond report on this plan," this is almost always what they mean.

The annual benchmark report. Separately, the company publishes "Judy Diamond's 401(k) Benchmark Report 2026," an industry study rather than a per-plan document. Its page describes it as examining "the overall performance of 401(k) plans for 27 industry verticals across 8 different performance metrics," built "by looking at over 680,000 401(k) plans," with results organized by firm size. It is sponsored and available by request; no price is published. Source: judydiamond.com/products/401k-benchmark-report/ (as published, observed 2026-09-13).

And the underlying source for both — worth saying out loud — is the same public record anyone can read. Every ERISA-covered plan files a Form 5500 with the Department of Labor, searchable free through EFAST2. What you are paying any vendor for is the joining, the peer cohorts, and the presentation, not access.

Judy Diamond login — and the question you are probably actually asking

If you are looking for the sign-in page, it is at judydiamond.com/login/ (HTTP 200, observed 2026-09-13), with a product picker for Prospector+ and the company's other databases. Bookmark it and move on — we are not going to pretend a login URL needs three paragraphs.

The more interesting version of this search is the one people do not type: I have this subscription, I log in every week, and I am starting to wonder whether it is doing the job. If that is you, the useful question is not "is Judy Diamond good" — it plainly is, at what it does. It is what job is my subscription actually doing, and is that the job I am stuck on? Run this test the next time you log in. Open your territory. Now answer, without guessing: which eleven of these plans should I call this week, and why those eleven? If the honest answer is "the ones with the ugliest Red Flags" or "the biggest ones" or "wherever I left off alphabetically," your subscription is doing research work while your actual bottleneck is sequencing — and no amount of additional search fields fixes a sequencing problem.

What about the "Judy Diamond list"?

People searching for a Judy Diamond list usually want one of two things: a purchasable list of 401(k) plans in their area, or an export they can push into a CRM. Prospector+ supports the second directly — its published CRM-Friendly Export lets you "upload any of our plan data and contact information into your other databases smoothly." Source: judydiamond.com/products/retirement-plan-prospector/ (observed 2026-09-13). The store sells access by geography — state, region, or national — so your "list" is scoped by the subscription you buy.

The caution that applies to any list in this category, ours included: it is drawn from filings that are public to everyone. Plans file up to seven months after plan-year end, with extensions to October 15, so public data is typically 6 to 18 months old by the time it is searchable, per the filing mechanics published on EFAST2. The advisor across town can build the same list from the same filings. A list is not an advantage. What you do with its order is.

Where does a search-and-report product run out of road?

Now the honest gap, stated as a checkable observation rather than a jab. Across every Judy Diamond page we fetched on 2026-09-13, the published feature surface is search, score, benchmark, and export on a filing snapshot. We found no published feature that monitors a plan for change, alerts you when something happens, or ranks plans by how likely they are to move next. That is not a flaw — it is the product's design, and for twenty-plus years it was the entire category.

But it leaves the expensive problem untouched. According to Steven Wilkinson in 401(k) Specialist, roughly nine hours of cold calling produces one appointment a week. According to Sharon Pivirotto of 401kbestpractices.com, "90% or more of all plans you're introduced to won't have a need," with a cycle around nine months in the small market and up to two years for larger plans. A Plan Score Card tells you a plan has problems. It cannot tell you the committee is meeting Thursday.

Hold those together: sponsors switch constantly, and nine in ten of your conversations reach sponsors who are not switching. Both are true at once only if the switches keep happening without you in the room. That is a timing failure, not a data failure — and it is the specific problem the rest of this page is about.

How do Judy Diamond and FiduciarySignal compare?

Same public filings in. Different questions asked of them. Full disclosure: the right column is ours.

Source: Judy Diamond store (store-listed prices, observed 2026-09-13).

What sits behind the right column: the 401(k) Report Card grades any plan from its own Form 5500 — administrative cost against genuinely comparable peers, participation, red flags, provider roster — and the Change Predictor ranks every plan in a territory by the odds of a winnable provider change — trustee, custodian, recordkeeper or administrator — before it happens. The engine is the Pre-Switch Signal Stack: 25 distinct switch signals — eleven of them live feeds, timestamped and refreshed weekly rather than annually — layered on a model trained on 8.9 million Form 5500 filings across ten years and back-tested against the next year's Form 5500 filings. It is strongest at the top of the ranking.

We do not publish which signals, and that is deliberate: every cue we print is a cue a copycat ships next quarter. What arrives on your screen is the verdict, the plain-English why, a calibrated "N times more likely" multiplier, and — for each flagged plan — talking points and a merge-ready outreach email built from that plan's own filing. And the limit, stated the same way we state it to customers: this is a work-the-top-of-the-list tool. Calibrated likelihoods, never certainty about any individual plan, strongest at the top of the ranking rather than across the broad middle. Built on public DOL EFAST2 data; not affiliated with the Department of Labor.

What Judy Diamond does better

A comparison that concedes nothing is a comparison you should distrust, so here is the real list. Transparent, self-serve pricing with the plan count attached to each SKU — you can see on a public page that one state costs $995 or the whole country costs $3,900 a year, and buy it with a card. Several vendors in this category still don't publish a number. Decades of tenure in a niche that has eaten plenty of better-funded entrants. Depth of search — 500+ advanced search fields is a lot of surface for someone who knows exactly what they are filtering for. And a complete meeting-prep workflow: score card, benchmark, talking points, marketing letters, and a report builder, all in one place, refined over many product generations. If your job is research and sponsor-meeting preparation, that combination is hard to fault.

Source: Judy Diamond store (store-listed prices, observed 2026-09-13).

Which should you choose?

Choose Judy Diamond if your workflow is research-first: you want the deepest filter set in the category, printable plan reports with benchmarking behind them, compliance red flags, and published per-territory pricing you can buy without a sales call — and your budget supports the edition that covers your patch. Nothing on this page argues against that, and no product in this space has been doing the job longer.

Choose FiduciarySignal if your problem is not "what does this plan look like" but "which of these plans should I call this week." You get your territory ranked by the Pre-Switch Signal Stack, refreshed weekly, with the reasoning and a ready-to-send email attached to each flagged plan, on self-serve pricing you can read before you talk to anyone. Some advisors will run both — research depth on one side, calling order on the other. That is a completely sensible answer. Just be clear which of the two problems is actually costing you meetings, because that is the one worth paying to solve first.

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