Speaking Engagements
In person or on Zoom
2025 KEYNOTE TOPIC:
THIS TIME ISN’T DIFFERENT
Shockproofing Our Clients
“The real key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.”
– Peter Lynch
The broad equity market has, since 1950, declined by an average of close to a third, on an average of every five years or so. Crying “This time it’s different,” many investors abandon equities, only to watch in painful regret as the advance of values and dividends resumes.
This talk, drawn from a forthcoming book, says that advisors can systematically prepare clients for meaningful declines through a kind of basic training, and coach them steadily through these episodes as they occur.
The steps:
- Help clients grasp that they are long-term owners of consistently successful businesses – many that they patronize all the time. And that the enduring value of those companies is often not reflected in panic-depressed stock prices. Our mantra: we own companies, not stocks.
- Give them something stronger to stay focused on instead of stock market fluctuations: a sound, robust financial plan – and the understanding that quality equities are the essential building block of that plan even when their prices are temporarily in retreat.
- Assure clients that the premium long-term return of equities and their occasional price declines are an organic whole – that the returns are an efficient market’s way of rewarding us for riding out the declines, which can’t be timed.
- Most important of all, relentlessly train clients to believe and trust us. At the moment of truth, clients don’t hold on because of any charts, graphs or statistics from the past. (Indeed, “this time it’s different” renders the past moot.) They hold on because the advisor whom they implicitly trust strongly encourages them to do so. This can be taught.
All these concepts are driven home by carefully worded scripts and other tools not previously published.
© 2025 Nick Murray