Surveying a troubled U.S. financial landscape

The you-know-what has hit the fan on Wall Street, and each day investors become more frightened.

As financial advisers and planners, your job is to help guide clients to make sound and informed financial decisions.

At InvestmentNews, our job is to cover the events as they unfold and deliver solid news and analysis — both online and in print — that will assist you in helping your clients.

This is no easy feat.

Rest assured, however, that we have the team to provide you with solid, relevant news coverage.

In order for us to keep you informed, we need to know what is important to you, our readers. That is why many of you have received an adviser reaction survey from InvestmentNews during the past couple of weeks.

I am sure that many of you are saying, “Jim, enough is enough. I get plenty of e-mails from you already.”

If it is becoming obnoxious, I am truly sorry. We won’t stop, but I apologize.

One adviser called me last week and said that he gets more e-mails from me than he does from some clients.

Another informed me that his wife (who isn’t an adviser) knew my name because of all the e-mails he receives from me. Despite the fact that we have never met, she feels like she knows me, the adviser said. I am feeling the love. Are you?

But seriously, it is very important for us to do these quick two- and three-question surveys to help our staff gauge where we need to concentrate our news coverage. Along the same line, we also recently launched INthecommunity, an online forum for advisers.

Again, that is a way for us to hear directly from you about what is going on in your lives as advisers.

I have to say that we are getting great response to our surveys, so I know we aren’t driving all of you that crazy — at least not yet.

For example, we sent out an e-mail survey asking our readers if they agreed with the federal government’s decision to bail out Fannie Mae of Washington and Freddie Mac, of McLean, Va. We received 1,302 responses.

InvestmentNews reporters David Hoffman and Sue Asci were able to generate several important stories, thanks to reader response.

We followed with a quick survey asking if you were thinking of moving clients out of mutual funds run by New York-based Neuberger Berman Inc. in light of recent developments involving Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., also of New York.

More than 850 of you took time out of your busy day to respond, which helped Bruce Kelly craft an insightful Page 1 story.

By understanding what is important to the reader, we think that we can better serve you with niche stories. We aren’t writing these stories for average investors, who may be stuffing money under a mattress at this point.

Our online and print news coverage is obviously aimed at what this all means to advisers. That focus will in turn assist your clients — the investor community.

Following the frenzied Wall Street developments involving Lehman, New York-based Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. and American International Group Inc., and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we sent out a short survey to see if your clients were expressing concerns about their portfolios. We also wanted to get some input from our adviser readers to see how they were reaching out to clients in an effort to offer some reassurance in what is a very unstable market.

Again, with 1,171 of our adviser readers responding and giving us solid input, the staff was able to develop and write many of the news stories that are online and in this issue of InvestmentNews.

There is a belief in business that when things are uncertain, a business owner needs to check with his customers to make sure everyone is on the same page and that the customer’s needs are being met.

As a result of doing these surveys and staying in touch with our readers, we believe we are writing the stories that you need and want. And we owe a debt of gratitude to all of you who are willing to share with us your thoughts and opinions.

Jim Pavia is the editor of InvestmentNews.