More bears than bulls: adviser sentiment survey

Continuing market volatility is taking its toll on financial planner sentiment, with planners now more pessimistic than they were in January and February, according to the latest data released by Wealth Insights.

Wealth Insights data reported by Money Management in late February suggested that planners remained optimistic about the outlook for their own businesses despite expecting that their clients would suffer from falling investment returns.

Indeed, the data published in February found that 78 per cent of planners described things as being good or very good compared with more than 90 per cent during the same period in 2007.

However, just over two months later the Wealth Insights Research on Adviser Sentiment has revealed a changing mood in the financial planning industry, with just 43 per cent of respondents believing things would be either good or very good, 45 per cent believing things would be average and 12 per cent thinking things would be bad.

The erosion of sentiment appears to have also infected planners’ views of how things will be within their businesses.

In January and February more than 50 per cent of respondents believed that their businesses were likely to be better or much better off over the next few months, whereas in April that figure had declined to 41 per cent.

Notwithstanding this decline in sentiment, planners seem optimistic about the long-term future of their industry with little or no change in the numbers suggesting that things would be mostly good over the next five years.

The Wealth Insights data suggested that in April 61 per cent of respondents believed things would be mostly good over the next five years, while 6 per cent believed things would be continuously good.