Investment Advisor Litigation When the Market Corrects

When the stock market finally corrects it will be the eighth major correction since I first started working on Wall Street back in the 1970s. It may happen next week or next year but it will certainly happen.  When the market does correct investors will certainly experience some losses.

Everyone understands that the stock market goes up and down. That does not mean that investors should expect to lose a significant amount of the money they made during the bull market when the correction does happen.

At every correction investors who lose more money than they anticipated bring claims for compensation against their stockbrokers and advisors.  For a stockbroker registered at FINRA most of the claims will be handled by FINRA in an arbitration proceeding. As soon as the claim is filed it shows up on the stockbroker’s Brokercheck report.

Many of the investment advisors who are registered with the SEC or with a state agency but not FINRA also have arbitration clauses in their customer agreements. They too are supposed to amend their disclosure filings to report customer claims, but few do.  I know of investment advisors who have had multiple customer claims but still show a clean record.

Investment advisors are always considered to be fiduciaries to their clients. As such they required to fulfill all of the duties of a fiduciary.  A fiduciary’s first duty is to protect the assets that are entrusted to them.

You cannot protect the assets in an investment portfolio unless you are prepared to sell them when the market turns down.  For advisors who are paid based upon the amount of money in the portfolio this creates a conflict of interest that no one wants to talk about.

Too much cash in the portfolio invites the customer to withdraw the cash and invest in something else, like real estate.  Good advisors will offer a large variety of investments so that they can always find one poised to increase in value or provide a steady income.

This will be the first market downturn where a significant amount of assets are being held by robo-investment advisors.  When the next correction comes, robo-investment advisors are going to be likely and easy targets for the plaintiff’s bar.  Robo-investment advisors are not programmed to sell positions when the market begins to turn down and are likely to stay invested while losses pile up.

Robo- investment advisors select their portfolios using algorithms that are fed with historical market data.  Everyone knows that past performance is no indicator of future results but the SEC allows this sham to continue. For a robo-investment advisor to have any value it would need to be able to assess what is happening in the real world economy and what is likely to happen as a result.

Robo-investment advisors claim to use asset allocation to select their portfolios and to protect their customers from losses. The simple truth is that most robo-advisors (and many human investment advisors) have no idea how asset allocation is done correctly.

The idea behind asset allocation is that you can create a portfolio of non-correlated assets that will reduce the risk if some macro-economic event rocks the markets.  Most robo-investment advisors give lip service to the idea of a diverse portfolio but few actually construct their portfolios correctly.

Many human and robo-investment advisors construct portfolios with asset classes such as “large cap stocks”, “mid-cap stocks” “small cap stocks” and “international stocks”.  As regards most macro-economic events such as a spike in the price of oil or an increase in interest rates, these asset classes are perfectly correlated with each other, not the opposite as they should be.

Asset allocation is designed to deal with the constant yin-yang between stocks and bonds triggered by interest rate fluctuations. For a long term portfolio, you would accumulate bonds at par when interest rates were high. As interest rates peak and began to come down, you would expect stocks to begin to appreciate, so you would sell bonds at a premium and begin buying good stocks in different, non-correlated industries.

Asset allocation works because its portfolio re-balancing system is based upon the premise that you will buy-low and sell-high. Robo-investment advisors re-balance their portfolio based upon a pre-determined formula that simply ignores what is likely to go up and what is likely to come down.  Many human advisors do not do the kind of research necessary to intelligently re-balance a portfolio either.

I worked on a lot of claims against stockbrokers and investment advisors after the market crashes in 2001 and 2008.  They always put up the same, weak defenses.

First, they argue that no one can predict the top of the market.  That is absolutely true and totally irrelevant. The great bulk of intelligent, prudent investors only invest in stocks that they think will appreciate in value. If your robo (or human) investment advisor told you to buy APPL or a mutual fund or ETF of “international stocks” it is fair that assume that they did so after some analysis that concluded the position would appreciate. Otherwise the advisor brings no value to the relationship.

If the advisor is actually doing that analysis and it includes more than just consulting a Ouija board, sooner or later that analysis will say “sell” or at least indicate that the share price will not appreciate much more.  The most common indicator is price/earnings ratio which economists tell us will usually fluctuate within an established range. When prices get out of the range on the high side, they will usually decline and revert to established norms.

Next, brokers and advisors defend these claims by arguing that clients should stay fully invested at all times because the market always comes back. That is another insipid defense.  It is akin to suggesting that you should keep your hand on a hot stove because it will eventually cool down.

As we approach the end of this long bull market every investor should be happy with the gains that they made in their portfolio. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has more than doubled since the end of 2008.  Even if your portfolio had a smaller gain, why would anyone want to give those gains back when the market declines?

Next, advisors offer lame excuses as to why they did not hedge the portfolio against a market downturn. There are a number of ways to accomplish this but very few advisers have a system to do so effectively.  I have asked many advisors why they do not hedge their portfolios or include stop loss orders to protect against a serious loss. They usually tell me that they were afraid to sell positions because the market would resume its climb and they would miss further gains.

That particular defense only works if the advisor has some research that suggests the market will go higher still. Many of the advisors that I cross-examined over the years had nothing more than their own gut feeling.

Where advisors tend to really screw up is when they get into the habit of adding speculative “alternative” investments to a portfolio to “juice” the returns. This may be acceptable for people who understand the risks and who are willing to accept the losses if things do not turn out as planned.  That does not describe a lot of people who are sold these investments thinking that they are hedging against losses in other investments.

Real estate investments are commonplace as an alternative and many advisors will add an exchange traded REIT to a client’s portfolios. These are very different than non-traded REITs which are usually private placements. The risk is much greater if the investment cannot be sold and at least some of the value retained.  Non-traded REITS have been the subject of thousands of claims against brokers and advisors in the last 10 years.

At the end of the day most of an advisor’s clients turn over the management of their portfolio because they want the portfolio to grow. That should not be that difficult for any good advisor but like anything else, you have to know what you are doing and you have to put in the hours to do it right.

Giving good professional investment advice takes skill and it takes effort, but it is also a people business. The number one complaint that I heard over and over, year after year, from people who contacted me asking about suing their broker or advisor was always the same, “He stopped returning my phone calls”.

When the market takes a sharp downturn, people want advice. That is another reason why robo-investment advisors are likely to see more litigation when the down-turn comes. They are never going to hold your hand.