What is My Advisor Doing During a Bear Market?

Anyone can seem like a good financial advisor when markets are doing well.  The expectation investors have when investing in capital markets is to make money, so when expectations are easy to meet, the bar tends to be set pretty low.  However, it's downturns in the markets that separate great financial advisors from mediocre ones. It's times like these when people may wonder what their financial advisor is doing during a down market.  I can't speak for all financial advisors, but I can tell you what the advisors at Financial Strategies Group have been and will continue to be doing in the weeks and months ahead.

Communicating

This is arguably the most crucial role of a financial advisor at any time, especially during a bear market.  When markets are volatile and times are uncertain, is your advisor calling, texting, or emailing you to check in?  Are they providing you with a written or video market commentary to help make sense of things?  Or are you spending your time trying to contact them and finding yourself waiting days for a callback?  It's essential to stay the course during market volatility, and it is much easier to stay in your seat if your advisor is proactive in communicating with you and offering perspective on what is going on with your accounts.

Understanding and Setting Expectations

As I mentioned above, the expectation of investing in the stock market is that you will make money.  In the short term, there is no guarantee that your investment will be worth more today than it was yesterday.  In the long term, capital markets will likely continue to grow.  As an advisor, it is my job to understand the expectations my clients have with growing their money and make sure they understand the short-term risk associated with long-term expectations.  At FSG, we employ software that shows various hypothetical best-case and worst-case market scenarios to help understand how much risk an investor will need to take for the reward they expect from their investments.  This allows us to stress-test volatile periods early on and observe how they could affect your investments.

Proper Asset Allocation

From an investment management standpoint, preparing for a down market happens long before the markets ever turn.  Here in the United States, we hear primarily about three market indexes: the S&P 500, the DOW Jones Industrial Average, and the NASDAQ 100, but there is a significant overlap among these indexes and what they are tracking.  So what you are actually getting is information on a concentrated portion of the economy.  There are dozens of asset classes across multiple sectors, different industries, and even different countries, and they all can behave differently from what you hear about in the news.  The fact of the matter is that a proactive money manager is not "predicting" the market days or even months in advance.  Instead, a proactive money manager is weaving risk mitigation into the very philosophy of their approach towards investing your money.

Rebalancing/Reconciling Portfolios

I recently spoke with a prospective client who said they were investing in a "60/40 portfolio" with another advisor, meaning that 60% of their money was invested in stocks, and 40% was in bonds.  However, when I ran an analysis of their holdings, we found that 85% of their portfolio had been in stocks!  Historically, stocks outperform bonds over long periods of time.  When left unattended, stocks that outperform bonds will represent a larger percentage of your portfolio than you originally wanted. Conversely, if bonds are outperforming stocks during a bear market, a higher bond concentration could mean you miss out on the growth and recovery of the stock market.  Rebalancing prevents that from happening. When an advisor is not monitoring and frankly actually managing their client's investments, especially during volatile periods, this can come at a considerable cost to you. Regular rebalancing of client portfolios is not only the best practice but can help mute some of the market losses to investors who are less comfortable with market risk and keep those with higher risk tolerance in the market for recovery.

Tax Loss Harvesting

Tax loss harvesting is a simple concept that is complicated to execute and has a potentially massive, positive impact on a client's taxes. Tax loss harvesting is when you have a taxable investment (where you are receiving a 1099 each year for dividends, interest, and realized gains or losses) in which you can sell a holding at a loss and replace it with another position. This way, you are realizing capital losses (which offset future gains and can be carried over on your taxes) without ever exiting the market. Bear markets provide an excellent opportunity for tax loss harvesting.

Roth Conversions

This is another simple and valuable concept. If you are utilizing a tax-deferred retirement account like an IRA, then you have the option of converting those pre-tax dollars to grow tax-free in a Roth with no tax penalty, regardless of your age. The amount you convert does get reported as taxable income in the year that you convert, but when account balances are down, then it is a relatively small tax bill at present and will make all of the growth you experience during the recovery TAX-FREE.

Encouraging Clients to Invest More

Each situation is different, and unfortunately, many people are feeling the effects of the tremendous inflation recently in the US. However, if you are in a position to funnel more money into the markets right now, then you should be doing so while everything is "on sale."  It is counterintuitive for average investors to enter markets when consumer confidence is down. Still, you need to understand that markets do recover, and this may be your opportunity to "buy low."

Taking care of my clients and putting their best interests first is the cornerstone of my practice as a financial advisor, and it is ingrained into the core values of our business here at Financial Strategies Group. From our staff to our technology, we are built to be effective and efficient for our clients. If you call, you get a person. If you text or email, you get a response. It is business as usual here, and we want to thank our clients for their confidence in us. We look forward to the recovery on the other side of this bear market.

Written by: Justin Meyer

View related content at the links below:

https://fsgmichigan.com/blog/the-dos-and-donts-during-market-volatility

https://fsgmichigan.com/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-stock-market-crash

https://fsgmichigan.com/vlog/5-wall-street-investing-lingos-explained

https://fsgmichigan.com/vlog/educational-moment-market-efficiency

This commentary on this website reflects the personal opinions, viewpoints and analyses of the Financial Strategies Group, Inc employees providing such comments, and should not be regarded as a description of advisory services provided by Financial Strategies Group, Inc or performance returns of any Financial Strategies Group, Inc Investments client. The views reflected in the commentary are subject to change at any time without notice. Nothing on this website constitutes investment advice, performance data or any recommendation that any particular security, portfolio of securities, transaction or investment strategy is suitable for any specific person. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. Financial Strategies Group, Inc manages its clients’ accounts using a variety of investment techniques and strategies, which are not necessarily discussed in the commentary. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.