In one of the more well-attended sessions, Roger Gibson of Gibson Capital Management Ltd. in Pittsburgh whipped out a series of tables and charts to prove a point: Diversification still counts-for a lot.

One of the charts illustrated how a portfolio with an equal mix of U.S. stocks, real estate securities and commodities achieved a compound annual return of 13.10% from 1972 to 2001-beating a portfolio comprised solely of domestic stocks by 86 basis points.

It's the type of long view that many investors and advisors forgot about during the late 1990s, he said. "Everyone said, 'Diversification sounds good, but it isn't working,'" Gibson said.

At another session, Richard Hoey, chief economist at Dreyfus, told attendees he suspected that after a bear market that cut the value of leading stock indexes in half, equities would perform better over the next five years than they have over the previous five years. Yet his enthusiasm was tempered. "All stocks have to do for the next five years to outperform five-year Treasuries is return 3% a year," he noted. "That shouldn't be too hard to do. We've had a 50% bear market in stocks."

Life planning and retirement issues arising from an aging population were also frequent themes during the forum. In one session, Mitch Anthony, author of The New Retirementality and Your Clients for Life, told advisors that they need to dispel themselves of the traditional view of retirement as they deal with clients.

Among the preconceptions that can be considered myths, he said, are that you can no longer work past a certain age, a life of ease and comfort is good, and you can plan your retirement all by yourself. "The age of 65 is no longer old," he said. "It's foolish that we have this given work-retirement (rule) at a given age."

Other timely topics were client risk-tolerance assessment and risk-tolerance education. Rick Adkins, CEO of The Arkansas Financial Group in Little Rock, developed his own risk-capacity index in the early to mid-1990s and has had his first chance to test its accuracy since the current bear market began in April 2000. "Five years ago, people could casually say they could tolerate a 15% to 20% loss in any given year," partly because they didn't think it really would happen, Adkins explained.

Geoff Davey, a prominent financial advisor from Bondi, Australia, who is a founder of ProQuest, a Web-based risk-profiling system, told attendees at the session that risk-tolerance and risk-perception issues were not just an American problem. "People's perception of risk has changed as they realized what they were doing was much riskier than they thought," Davey remarked.

The final panelist at this session, Dave Loeper, CEO of Financeware, raised a few eyebrows by challenging some traditional asset allocation assumptions and suggesting that some brokers and advisors told clients to take risks they didn't need to take. The head of the Virginia Retirement System referred a retiree to Loeper whose advisor had turned $5 million into $2 million by investing in overvalued growth stocks like General Electric.

After Loeper noted that this gentleman would have been just fine in municipal bonds, one attendee accused him of using a rearview mirror to second-guess advisors. Loeper stuck to his guns.