Advisers reaching out to anxious clients

Wall Street’s meltdown is shaking many financial advisers to their cores. More than 77% of 1,003 advisers who responded to an InvestmentNews survey over the past 36 hours fear the news coming out of Wall Street is likely to get worse before it gets better. More than 81% of respondents said they had heard from anxious clients since news of the government’s bailout of Fannie Mae of Washington and Freddie Mac of McLean, Va., New-York based Lehman Brothers Holding Inc.’s demise, Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America Corp.’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. of New York and New York-based American International Group Inc.’s financial woes. Meanwhile, 90% of respondents said they had reached out to clients on their own. That said, 70.3% of advisers said they were not making any changes to their clients’ allocations to equities in light of the fiscal mayhem. But 13.6% said they would increase those allocations and 16.2% said they would decrease them. The full results of the survey, with insights from advisers and experts, will be reported in the Sept. 22 issue of InvestmentNews.