Bear Market Portfolio Insights and Tips for Anxious Advisors

As a senior portfolio strategist at Janus Henderson Investors, Lara Reinhard spends much of her time speaking with financial advisors from across the Unites States, working to understand the way they build client portfolios and respond to emerging challenges.

Reinhard says she enjoys the work because of the product-agnostic angle her team can employ, and because she engages in constructive dialogue with so many skilled and dedicated financial advisors.

Over the years the portfolio strategy team has been in operation, Reinhard tells ThinkAdvisor, the group has analyzed upwards of 17,000 distinct advisor investment models, finding both significant degrees of uniformity and divergence across the industry. Overall, Reinhard says, the discussions with advisors show many of them feel like they are operating on an island, with surprisingly little insight into what their peers and competitors are doing.

In the Q&A dialogue presented below, Reinhard offers some key portfolio construction insights for advisors, including some specific suggestions for how to understand and respond to the current moment in the markets. As Reinhard explains, slowing growth, increasing inflation and significant market volatility are challenging advisors and creating concerns for clients.

Fortunately, Reinhard says, the current moment in the market also has its silver linings, and advisors can take steps today to position their clients for better days ahead.

THINKADVISOR: In your ongoing discussions with financial advisors, what kind of concerns are you hearing about most often?

Reinhard: What we hear the most, and this is true going back well before the current market drop, is that so many advisors feel like they are on an island, which I think some people would probably find surprising from the outside. What I mean is that many advisors don’t have a great sense of what their peers in other firms or regions are doing in terms of developing investments and managing their clients’ assets.

We also see a lot of cases where advisors are, say, based in a firm that has a well-defined approach, but they see themselves as doing things differently than their peers and colleagues — and that makes them feel uncomfortable. There are a lot of advisors out there today who feel somewhat uncomfortable about their approach to investing because they are not just adhering to their firm’s prescribed approach or guidance.

For advisors in this situation, getting some additional visibility by speaking with us is a meaningful thing for them. We can give them assurances that, for example, many of their peers also have a strong home bias in their equity portfolios. This home bias is something that is very common right now in the U.S. advisor community, and it’s starting to be a point of focus.

What are advisors telling you about the volatility they are experiencing in client portfolios? How concerned are they?

There is obviously a lot of concern and discomfort at this moment. Just like their clients, we see a lot of advisors feeling compelled to want to do something to respond to this moment. They want to make changes to show they are being proactive and that they are trying to help their clients.

Frankly, there’s not necessarily a lot that advisors can do right now. We do recommend that they engage with us and our portfolio management peers, to make sure everything is indeed in line. The advisor can then go to their clients and offer some reassurance that they have undergone a portfolio review and that they have confidence that things are on the right track.

On the bright side, while the history of the S&P 500 Index tells us there is likely more pain to come, it also tells us that patient investors have historically experienced more upside than downside over the long term. Since 1939, every time the S&P has crossed the 20% loss threshold into bear market territory, additional downside usually occurs.

In fact, inclusive of that drawdown, the next 12 months have resulted, on average, in a positive gain of 15% and a full recovery has always occurred within four years. In our view, we have now reached the point where investors should view the current landscape as a blank slate and seek to take advantage of new opportunities.

What are some of the ways in which advisor-driven portfolios could be improved?

As I mentioned, one very common theme we have seen in the past several years is a rampant home bias within the equity portfolios that U.S.-based financial advisors are building.

Once again, advisors are like their clients in this respect. They live here in the U.S., and they understand the companies and the market that exists here, and so they feel more comfortable investing here and owning the companies that operate here.

It’s really interesting because, in our collaboration with our global portfolio strategy team, we have seen that this bias exists pretty much everywhere that advisors are doing their thing and building portfolios. We see it in the U.K., for example.

Interestingly, this bias has actually helped U.S. advisors in the recent past, because companies here have delivered a good return over the last five years. What we bring to these advisors is a reminder that this bias exists and that it won’t always pay off, and that global diversification remains incredibly important over the long term.