Following the advice of Wall Street’s best minds resulted in huge losses at key inflection points, and Wall Street's ability to forecast the S&P 500 is too unreliable to be helpful and not even close to accurate. 

That's the conclusion of an independent economist who has tracked the predictions of Wall Street top strategists’ in Barron’s every year since 2007. 

It’s unlikely you’ll see this 2019 year-end tax tip in the financial press, and it has not in the trade press currently. However, as a CFP^®, CPA, CFA, CIMA^® or retirement-income professional, this is probably the best 2019 year-end strategy for building your reputation as a thought leader. It's a substantive way to engage clients and prospects who are thought leaders in their chosen fields. 

Advisor email newsletters often never make it to the intended consumer's Inbox. They go to junk, spam, or clutter folder. What can you do to fight back?  Here's the answer.

Two months ago, economist Fritz Meyer began using the phrase, "upward revisions to accelerating earnings," to describe the outlook for profits. The new tax law, he said, would gradually add eight percentage points to 2018 earnings growth on the S&P 500. 

Since Fritz first made this observation in late December, earnings forecasts tracked by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S have been ratcheting higher fairly steadily. For weeks, advisors subscribing to our website platform have benefited from a weekly financial news stream with updaties on the unfolding earnings surge. Clients and contacts saw it in emails, videos, articles, tweets, scripts and animated GIFs, all of which are customized personally. 

The final year-end tax alerts for clients of CPA/PFS, CFP, CIMA, CFA, and other financial professionals are ready for Advisor Products subscribers to email. So are related videos, articles, scripts, and animated GIFs to share with clients and everyone you know. Here's a three-minute video about how to do that, if you're a subscriber to FAME 3.0 (Financial Advisor Marketing Engine).

Of all the tax reform Acts I’ve covered since TEFRA 35 years ago, this one was the most fun — not just because of the drama staged in the Capitol but also because of the pioneering work powered by our all-star team.   Here's the story in a nutshell.

Details of a proposed $1.5 trillion tax cut package are expected Wednesday, according to the White House.

Eighty-percent of advisors want to spend no time updating their website, but they still want a dynamic, engaging and cool presence online.

To grow your practice, it’s smart to allow clients and prospects to book a meeting with you from your email newsletter.

Integrating advisor calendars with advisor websites and email newsletters is an important business building feature of Build Advisor Websites (BAW), our content management system for financial planners and RIAs. 

Advisors can preview email newsletters using the  Build Advisor Websites (BAW) content managament system (CMS). For advisors, this allows you to send out email newsletters about breaking news we cover for you and to change anything you do not like.

BAW builds a workflow into weekly email newsletters for advisors. Every week, when a new video or investment updateis ready to be emailed, your email newsletter with your branding is emailed to you. So you can pre-review emails before they are sent to clients. If you don't like a headline, image or text, you can change it yourself. In addition,  the changes to the article in your email newsletter will also be posted to the article on your website. 

In the 20-year race to develop software for managing advisor websites and secure communications, Advisor Products has neither been a turtle nor a hare but a beaver, unceasingly building the best damn websites ever offered to advisors.

With terrorist attacks now a weekly event, the European Union facing an existential political threat, and the speed of news causing two double-digit stock price plunges in the past 11 months, communicating with your contacts is more important than ever, and more delicate.

Our breaking news coverage enables you to send your contacts a stream of information crafted with help from independent thought leaders, including economist Fritz Meyer, MPT-expert Dr. Craig Israelsen, tax and financial planning guru Robert Keebler, CPA/PFS.

Dr. Craig Israelsen, one of the nation's foremost experts on implementing low-cost potfolios based on Modern Portfolio Theory, has begun contributng his research to advisors through the Advisor Products video library.

The first video uses a new data visulaization method to illustrate the risk of running out of money in retirement. 

Advisor Products now enables advisors to edit articles we write for advisor websites and email newsletters onscreen. We're giving you financial journalism that you can edit onscreen on the fly whenever major financial news breaks. It's a financial advisor news service you can customize to your needs.

An advisor last week told me sending a weekly email to clients is a bad idea. “It sends a bad message by focusing on short-term news,” he said.

I understand why he said that, but then showed him why he was wrong.

At about 4 p.m. ET last Friday — 48 hours after the attack in San Bernardino — the FBI called the fatal shooting of 14 people an act of terror. Suddenly, performance of the stock market after the attack was a compelling story.

Immediately after the attack, late Wednesday afternoon, stocks prices fell, and they dropped again on Thursday. On Friday, however, by the end of trading, stocks had recouped those losses.

On the Monday morning following the Friday, November 13, terrorist attacks in Paris, Jim Cramer said on TV that some traders appeared to have had knowledge in advance of the terrorist plots that killed at least 130. Cramer, in spinning his consipracy theory, exposes the true character of his coverage.   

If you manage assets in diversified portfolios, your clients’ portfolios are probably trailing the S&P 500. Since the financial press reports on performance of the S&P 500, clients usually expect your advice to keep pace with the S&P 500, and you may not be meeting their expectations. Prudent financial professionals who rely on Modern Portfolio Theory are vulnerable to advisors peddling far less prudent advice.  

This video is what Advisor Products is doing to help professionals who doing the right thing to communicate about this issue effectively and inexpensively using modern Internet tools.

With Advisor Video Library (AVL), financial advisors can post videos to ANY website.

The Advisor Video Library gives you a library of 15 FINRA-reviewed videos quarterly. You can narrate them using AVL or skip the narration and use the voiceover we provide. The content of these videos is uncommonly intelligent.

I mentioned in a recent blog entry that you can now post these FINRA-reviewed videos to any website and they will be automatically updated once you copy and paste an embed script on your blog or any web page. 

Five new videos are now available for this quarter's edition of Advisor Video Library, including the one below, which explains why cilents should not expect diversified portfolios you provide to perform as well as the S&P 500.

While the video is only a minute and twenty-seconds in length, it communicates a lesson that clients need to be reminded of frequently, a lesson critical to client retention and keeping investors diversfied over the long run.

Our quarterly economic and market perfromance report is now ready for advisors to download. 

This is a PowerPoint 24 slides and each slide is accompanies by a short article.

With 3Q2015 ending yesterday, subscribers to Advisor Products FA marketing engine (FAME) should look for a flurry of new content release in the next two weeks.

While many advisors fear covering markets weekly will train their clients to have a short-term perspective, such fears are misplaced.

Take a look at the update distributed last Friday in email newsletters by hundreds of RIAs to tell their clients what to make of the Fed’s decision to leave rates unchanged last week.

Since the 30-minute, 1000-point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Monday morning, August 24, A4A and Advisor Products have produced five continuing professional education webinars for financial professionals, plus: a video advisors can narrate, showing seven other emotional plunges that have roiled markets since the beginning of the global financial crisis in September 2007; subscribers to Financial Advisor Marketing Engine (FAME) were provided with two 500-word FINRA-submitted articles, putting the correction in proper context in email newsletters written after the stock market closed and emailed to clients Friday night and early Saturday. Another Friday update will be written this evening, after the market closes.

The collaboration with Fritz Meyer, Craig Israelsen, and other thought leaders has worked like a dream in this period of turbulence. It's a thrill for me to have these incredibly smart people helping me help you.

Breaking news, like last Monday’s 1000-point Dow drop, challenges financial professionals to meet client expectations. Many advisors did nothing to communicate with clients and contacts. Some might argue that reacting to every dip sends the wrong message to clients. They are deluding themselves.

Your biggest clients, people in their 60s and 70s, are all watching TV. Most get news from a mobile device. The headlines last week could easily have made a nervous retirement investor fearful.

Advisor videos we're offering are totally different from anything else in the industry. Look at the 35-second video below, which is one of the 15 new FINRA-reviewed videos made available recently.

Making a video is hard, time-consuming and can be expensive. I've seen advisors more than once who are smart, articulate, and animated get in front of a camera and freeze.

If you optimize the location of client assets, you are different from the vast majority of advisors. Here's a way to explain that, literally, in your own voice.

The video illustrates complex ideas differentiating advisors who optimize portfolios for taxation. Posting this video in your own voice on YouTube and embedding it in a blog post on your website, or on a static marketing page on your website, concisely shows the value of your advice 24/7 in three minutes.

The integration of Advisor Products content with Constant Contact is boosting advisor email campaign open rates by nearly 100% over the average advisor's open rate, according to data from users.

Advisor Products integrates Constant Contact’s email marketing tools and analytics into financial advisor websites, and the first users of the integrated app provided their email “key performance indicators,” which are tracked in Constant Contact.

In mid-February 2014, Tim McNamara, who heads sales at Constant Contact, the world leader in online marketing, called Steve Gordonson, a partner in Advisor Products. Since then, we’ve worked intensely with the leadership team at Constant Contact, including Alec Stern, the sole co-founder of Constant Contact still working at the company.  The partnership establishes a way for advisors to get email campaign open rates nearly 100% higher than the average financial advisor using Constant Contact. [caption id="attachment_1861" align="aligncenter" width="483"]Advisor Products turns professional education content from Advisors4Advisors into email newsletters, enabling optimal use of Constant Contact for list management and analytics.[/caption]

Tim had spent five years in business development and operations at  Schwab and then 10 years as an advisor at UBS, Morgan Stanley and Wachovia.  He's been an internet entrepreneur, having built the nation's first online divorce platform. A year ago, Tim became the head of business development for North America and Latin America at Constant Contact.