Dramatic market events aren't the problem for client portfolios, but the way clients react to them can be. Once New York adviser Jonathan Blau started shaping this realisation around his advice delivery process, things changed in a big way.

The penny finally dropped for Jonathan Blau in 2008, during the market slump that followed the global financial crisis (GFC), which halved the value of the S&P 500 index in less than nine months.

Having built, with colleague Harvey Radler, New York-based wealth management practice the Blau Radler Group, and run it under the umbrella of first Morgan Stanley Smith Barney and then UBS Financial Services, Blau had seen “repeat iterations of the same thing” wash through his client book.

As an intern at Lehman Brothers in the summer of 1988, he saw the market winter that followed the 1987 crash; he saw the dot.com crash in 2000, working in wealth management at Sanford. C. Bernstein; the slump after the September 11 attacks in 2001; and now, the GFC crash, from the vantage point of UBS.