June 16, 2026 | 1:00pm ET | 1 CE Credit
The Challenge of Delivering Advice in Uncertain Capital Markets:
The capital-markets landscape is brimming with questions, and external and geopolitical shocks are emerging more often. This poses a stiff challenge for advisors: guiding portfolios to support increasingly dynamic retirement plans. The stakes are high. With longer lives, finish lines are distant and there are no restarts. Emotion adds complexity: advisors must help clients overcome short-term impulses that may lead them off track.
The AllianceBernstein Advisor Institute’s Ken Haman leads a wide-ranging conversation with AB Chief Market Strategist Rick Brink, exploring how the world of behavioral finance intersects with the challenges of today’s uncertain capital markets, including:
The Challenge of Delivering Advice in Uncertain Capital Markets: The capital-markets landscape is brimming with questions, and external and geopolitical shocks are emerging more often. This poses a stiff challenge for advisors: guiding portfolios to support increasingly dynamic retirement plans. The stakes are high. With longer lives, finish lines are distant and there are no restarts. Emotion adds complexity: advisors must help clients overcome short-term impulses that may lead them off track.
The critical role of the path of returns in portfolio design: In part one, we zoomed across a half century of financial markets chapters to highlight one of investors’ biggest challenges: defending long-horizon portfolios from sequence-of-returns risk.
Lessons from capital-markets history hold critical insights for portfolio design today. In the first installment of the Build a Better Path series, we adjust our lens. Instead of zooming into a specific topic, we’ll zoom out, assessing the big picture of investing today. Market dynamics have been shifting—and not for the better—amid structural headwinds, years of sequential inflation/affordability shocks, and recurring geopolitical flare-ups. The challenge for investors? Designing portfolios to deliver return paths that make the most of what markets have to offer.