As a cascade of Middle East war-related headlines hit on Monday including a hike in oil prices, financial advisors at Future Proof Citywide in Miami said their clients are still mostly sanguine about the moment, with the real work potentially coming from picking up new investors seeking advice and calm.
“We have not been getting many inquiries,” Larry Sprung, founder and wealth advisor at Mitlin Financial, based in Hauppauge, N.Y., said on the sidelines of the conference. “I think that’s the way we position things with families. Right from the outset, we are less market-driven and more financial plan and goals-driven, and keeping people focused on that perspective.”
Strung said his firm, a Carson Group partner RIA, has a client advisory council to gather feedback on topics such as the level of communication with the firm. He said a regular Tuesday newsletter from Mitlin has been enough for those clients.
“In a lot of cases, they sometimes don’t even read the newsletter, but the fact that they know it’s there gives them comfort, and if something goes awry, they can go back and read,” he said. “We feel that adding an extra notice or email or call actually raises the tension; it doesn’t lower it.”
Christine Cao, who leads investment and portfolio management at Rosen Group Private Wealth Management, which is based in Toronto but has an office in the U.S., said her clients were not reaching out due to the firm’s history of communication and management.
“Volatility needs to be expected, and it’s a good opportunity to rebalance,” she said. ‘It’s the way we position accounts as well. We’re not 100% in equities, so they have diversity.”
The theme at Citywide Future Proof was artificial intelligence in wealth management, including various uses for investment and client portfolios. And while advisors may not have been focused on current market volatility, they were interested in attending panels and speaking with vendors about the potential to manage it more effectively.
Eugene Yashin, founder, CEO, and CIO of Signet Financial Management, who has been managing quant-based investments for his clients for decades, said his firm’s use of a homegrown AI agent has made identifying and making investment decisions much easier and faster.
“We’re becoming so much more proactive,” he said. “It gives you the idea of what’s going to happen to your portfolios, and we could very quickly implement, or we can override if we disagree.”
Yashin and his team use an AI agent called Holi, created by Holistiplan, a company created by Yashin and his partner—and one-time Signet intern Dmitry Grudzinskiy. And while Yashin doesn’t, at this moment, see Holi making broad recommendations due to rising oil prices, there have been examples of the AI flagging potential changes in response to market events.
“Let’s say the Federal Reserve makes a change in the interest rate,” Yashin said. “Holi wakes up and says, ‘Eugene, the Federal Reserve reduced interest rates, and it’s going to impact these clients of yours, and these strategies, because it knows all the clients and all the books.”
James Bogart, the founder and CEO of Bogart Wealth, said good advisors should use the uncertainty as an opportunity to add value to existing clients or bring in new ones.
“An advisor’s job is to solve people’s problems,” he said. “Good advisors put themselves in a position to anticipate what that problem is going to be. Content, communication—that’s what differentiates an advisor. … Most advisors kind of ignore these environments and don’t think the clients are reacting to them, and they absolutely are.”
Bogart, based in McLean, Va., started publishing content on the war and markets last week and will continue through channels including video, blogs and direct messages. He also said that if the market continues to dip, his advisors will consider taking action with clients.
One such opportunity, he said, may be to have a client implement a Roth conversion while savings are down. Another particular opportunity for Bogart, which built much of its original client base with ExxonMobil, is to sell off energy investments when prices are high.
Edward Burgio, co-owner and financial advisor with Harbor Wealth Advisors, said it hasn’t yet gotten many questions from clients. He attributes that, in part, to many of their clients having been with them for 10 years or more.
“They’ve gone through things like the COVID markets with us,” he said. “If this goes on for weeks, we might start getting calls, but it has been kind of quiet so far.”
