What Financial Advisors Should Say to Clients During a Bear Market: 4 Communication Strategies

This article originally appeared on Advisorpedia on July 11th, 2022, and can be found here.

When stocks go down, communication from your financial advisor should go up.

However, many financial advisors don't know what exactly to say to clients during times of extreme market volatility - because they either don't want to alarm them (don't want them over-consuming financial news media) or they don't want to beat a dead horse (how much is too much communication? ).

How many ways can you say the same thing over and over again - "just stay the course?"

To help, I've got 4 communication strategies that do work that I suggest you utilize if you are a financial advisor right now.

1. Remember - No one fires their advisor for communicating too much. But they do for not communicating ENOUGH.
2. Put "this time" into historical context (CHART: Dimensional Fund Advisors Bull vs. Bear)
3. Use visuals To communicate more effectively (CHART: Bank of America )
4. Help them remember why they hired you. You help prevent emotionally based decisions. (Equity Allocation Change if S&P 500 falls 10-20%) CHART:Andrew Lo, Alexander Remorov and Zied Ben Chaouch, authors of the January 2019 study Measuring Risk Preferences and Asset-Allocation Decisions: A Global Survey Analysis