article by Invesco
This piece is approved to use with clients.
Behavioral finance principles can be applied to an Advisors practice to help clients remain invested and focused on the long-term, while avoiding behavioral mistakes that can destroy their wealth.
How can Advisors help clients navigate these challenging times, focus on goals, and find a level of calm in their financial life?
2020 has been an unprecedented and emotionally-charged ride — the most difficult for advisors in over a decade. Yet as the year ends, significant uncertainty lingers regarding the markets, the economy, and the election that continues to rattle investor nerves.
While crisis-level activity has largely subsided, advisors remain very active relative to "normal" levels of activity we saw during the bull market run.
During these volatile market swings and stay at home orders for investors, advisors remain very active. Investing activity last week was still two times average transaction volume as compared to the past 18 months. While the equity markets showed strong performance last week, advisors remained in a neutral risk stance. Cash as a percentage of portfolio dropped to 5% from 6.2%, a nearly 20% drop in cash allocations.
Advisors are very slowly reducing cash levels. Their attitude toward risk is neutral, repeating last week's trend, in that both risky and non-risky assets saw nearly zero net flows.
Advisors remain very active making small changes to client portfolios, harvesting tax losses, and fine tuning risk tolerance, while generally keeping their clients invested to meet their objectives.
One of the biggest challenges in investing is to stay focused and on course. Investors must look at the markets from a historical perspective for broader context, and to better understand why it is important to stay the course during both calm and perilous markets.