Yes, there are gradations between the bookends and some overlap, but basically, you either believe the government will always be the backstop and things will be fine once we open the economy again or you think things have permanently changed in unpredictable ways.

To be clear, I’m not here to convince you of which point of view you should have. But I do want to convince you to HAVE a point of view, to be thoughtful in how you develop that view, and to be visible and vocal in sharing it.

Six Questions To Form Your Point Of View
To help you form your point of view, here are six questions that you should have deep, thoughtful, strong answers to. Three of these relate to common questions you may hear from clients, while the other three revolve around your view of the future. Most of your communication going forward should be variations on these themes.

Questions Clients Ask You:

1. Am I still OK?
Whenever there’s a significant drop in the markets, many clients want to know if their financial plan is still on track. Of course, this is job one for you and it starts from day one of working with your clients.

From the beginning, it’s about setting appropriate expectations, setting aside liquid assets so you’re not forced into selling at an inopportune time, and developing an investment plan to support their financial plan. You know what to do here and should be able to answer this question relatively easily.

2. What should I do now?
This one gets a little bit harder and will depend on how you answer questions 3, 5, and 6 below. During the current crisis, many advisors rebalanced portfolios, did tax-loss harvesting, and repositioned portfolios to take advantage of “bargains.” Some advisors made no changes and just reinforced to their clients that drops like this were expected, planned for in advance, and are within the bounds of past experience. Either way, you should have a strong response to the question and be able to back it up with thoughtful analysis.

3. When do you think things will get back to normal and the markets will settle down?
They’re asking us to predict the future which we obviously can’t. But we need to have a point of view on this in terms of what do we think needs to happen and in what order before we can even hope to have things get back to some semblance of normality.

Peter Mallouk of Creative Planning has done a great job of consistently promoting his point of view across various media outlets including Forbes, Worth, Yahoo!, Bloomberg, Fox and Twitter. For example, here’s his “point of view” that he wrote in Worth on March 31 about when and how things will “get back to normal.”

“As soon as investors see some sign of progress, the markets will change. We don’t need to have a cure or vaccine, just some signal that the spread is under control and that we’re ‘flattening the curve.’ What we have now is really two crises—one health care, one financial. Once we have the health care aspect under control, the markets will rebound. If the health care crisis ends in four to eight weeks, the recovery will look like a V shape, where everything goes down and then quickly goes back up once people are back to work. If it takes three to four months, it will look more like a U shape; and if it ends up being a worst-case scenario, we’re looking at an L-shaped recovery.”

In that single paragraph he answered:
1. What will cause the markets to turn back up.
2. The timing of the upturn.
3. The three potential shapes and timing of the economic recovery.
4. The reasons for the three different shapes of the recovery.