Chalk it up to youthful energy, a less-jaded worldview or the generation gap, but millennial financial advisors are more optimistic about the markets and more likely to view market volatility as temporary, according to a survey released Wednesday by Eaton Vance Investment Managers.
The survey is an addendum to an Advisor Top-of-Mind Index survey the company released in May that polled more than 1,000 advisors of different age groups on four key topics: income, volatility, taxes and growth. This new survey breaks out millennial advisors to gauge their take on these issue.
Among the findings, 74 percent of millennial advisors believe that market volatility will settle before the end of the year, versus 43 percent of all advisors.
In that vein, a significantly smaller number of millennial advisors (26 percent) view market volatility as the new normal, compared to 57 percent of all other advisors.
Then again, market volatility has been good to millennial—and probably all—financial advisors, with 40 percent of millennial advisors reporting they’ve attracted new clients due to rising market volatility.
According to the survey, millennials also differ from their older colleagues on other issues, such as 66 percent of them viewing traditional bonds as a good income source for clients versus 43 percent for other advisors.
And within the fixed-income sphere, 90 percent of millennial advisors said that some or all of their clients have some of their portfolios in high-yield products, while 70 percent said some or all of their clients have an allocation to the floating rate loan market.
It’s not stated in the survey how those rates compare to other advisors.