CONFERENCES and EVENTS
After lunch, Melissa Snell, senior advisor consultant with Franklin
Templeton, discussed ways brain impulses thwart investment
success. Natural tendency to make quick judgments to avoid
risks and find rewards include:
•
Herding – People follow the crowd because they fear
making mistakes or missing opportunities, which can result
in buying high and selling low. A film clip from the Candid
Camera TV show demonstrated the difficulty of straying from
the herd. An individual entered an elevator where everyone
stood backwards and slowly succumbed to the nonsense.
• Anchoring – Investors can become fixed on a price or
rate of return instead of setting realistic expectations. It’s
important to explain normal volatility.
• Loss aversion – Because the pain associated with loss is
more intense than the reward felt from gain, investors may
flock to cash or equivalents when markets fall.
• Recency bias – Individuals often overvalue immediate
rewards at the expense of long-term goals. They remember
the losses but forget the rebounds.
• Home country bias – Individuals favor companies
and industries they are familiar with and may overweight
their portfolios as a result. For instance, the Gulf Coast
loves energy.
Following an economic update from Emily Roland, head of
Capital Markets Research at John Hancock Investments,
Roberta Eckert, vice president of Nationwide Retirement
Institute, advised attendees to guide clients through health
care factors that can impact their retirement and cost of living.
She shared these daunting facts:
• Health care expenses are usually the second largest
expense during retirement years.
• Eighty percent of people don’t know what their health
care costs will be in retirement.
• Sixty-seven percent of affluent individuals list out-of-control
health care costs as one of their top fears.
• Seventy-five percent of investors want to talk about health
care costs with their advisor.
• The average 65-year-old couple will spend $265,000 -
$369,000 on health care, and that doesn’t include
long-term care.
A leading memory expert, Ron White, brought Wednesday’s
second keynote sponsored by SC Distributors. Among other
feats, he wowed the audience by memorizing 98 percent of
attendees’ first names. White declared memorization is a
learned skill, everyone can improve their memory and
developing a system eases memorization.
19 The STAR | NOVEMBER 2018
He described five keys to better memorization.
The first was focus. If we don’t focus on what
someone is saying, he explained, it will be difficult
to remember what they told you. If we are thinking
about what we will say during an introduction, we
may have trouble remembering a name. As you
approach someone, your focus should be “what’s
her name, what’s her name, what’s her name.”
Wednesday evening, conference attendees
grabbed their boots and cowgirl hats they
picked out via a specialty Wild Bill stand-up
shop, compliments of LIWF, and boarded a
shuttle to The Ranch at Las Colinas, where they
enjoyed a barbecue and dancing to the tunes
of a live local band.
Kicking off Thursday morning, Philip Blancato,
CEO and president of Ladenburg Thalmann
Asset Management, and Denise Chisholm of
Fidelity Investments provided insights on how
advisors can help clients invest in various sectors,
while taking into consideration clients’ different
traits and risk factors.
Next, I was honored to lead an advisor panel
made up of five talented, successful women
who discussed everything from client acquisition
and retention strategies to succession planning.
Kim Kropp from Omaha, Nebraska, the featured
panelist from Securities America, described some
of her most successful women’s events, which
draw several hundred women clients and their
guests several times per year. From renting out
a movie theater to present Invesco’s “Picture
Your Prosperity” program to her cybersecurity
and personal security/self-defense events, I can
personally attest to the amazing success she
experiences with these highly engaging events.
Other participants discussed how they’ve
brought more women into the fold with their
Wine, Women & Wealth events, Second Saturday
Divorce Workshops, Dream Board and Master
Gardening presentations.
All the women said they “love what they do” and
were perfectly made for what they are doing.
What is so amazing about these women is that
as successful as they are, they all have this inner
drive to keep getting better at enriching the lives
of everyone around them.