This is the digital age and news travels fast. If we had put out something alerting clients of the flash crash, we would not have told any clients that follow business news anything they hadn’t already heard. Plus, while today’s media seems to place emphasis on being fast, we think it better to be accurate. 

In contrast, for clients that do not follow business news, if we had issued a special alert, we would have contributed to tuning them into things they want to tune out. Because of our measured approach, any unscheduled communication raises an issue to a different level.

Clients have told us they don’t need us to add to the deluge of information and opinion.  What they need and most appreciate is perspective and a viewpoint on what events mean to their family’s finances.   

If I had a nickel for every time I read that advisors can’t communicate with their clients too much, I’d be retired. That may be true for some clients, but not ours. Our clients want to avoid immersion in the day-to-day changes in the economy and markets. If we are not careful, we can undermine the value we provide by dragging them into the often crazy world of finance, consuming the time and energy we freed up for them. An effort to provide good service can actually become a disservice.

Studies show that the more information people get about their holdings, the more compelled they feel to act on the information and the worse they do. Clients need to be informed, but defining “informed” as “getting a lot of information” is a mistake. Quality should take precedent over quantity. There is already too much information out there, and it is simply not possible to ignore world and market events.

A few weeks after the flash crash, my family went on a Mediterranean cruise. The last day in the office before the trip, the S&P closed at 1087. The news was about the European debt crisis, the oil spill and the World Cup. On my first day back in the office, it closed at 1086 and the news was about the European debt crisis, the oil spill and the World Cup, almost as if nothing had happened. 

However, even being at sea didn’t insulate us from the news. Everyday there was at least one person mentioning the markets, which took a bit of a swoon during our trip. I met a few CNBC-junkie passengers who were truly stressed by it all. 

I have great confidence in my partners and staff. I was able to get my mind back in vacation mode fairly quickly after someone would pull me back into the financial world by sharing market news with me. I experienced firsthand the value of having the day to day attended to by competent ethical professionals. Many who got regular doses of market news didn’t have that support and sure seemed to have a different experience. 

So what did we do? We reached out selectively to those clients we believed might want to talk about things. We did not put out a special firm-wide communication.

Of course, just because our clients didn’t call us expressing concern doesn’t mean necessarily that they were not concerned. The silence just made us feel better about not rushing. Our internal debate wasn’t about whether to say something, it was about what, when and how. We gave our take on what it all meant in our regularly scheduled material. This seems to have worked well for our clients.