The main theme of the week will be the disconnect.
People are feeling one thing. Their portfolios are saying something else.
The University of Michigan's consumer sentiment gauge hit the lowest level in its 74-year history this month.
NFIB’s latest read on small businesses, which employ nearly half of American workers, showed optimism dropping below the 52-year average, with capital spending plans at their lowest since November 2009.
At the same time, the S&P 500 closed Friday at an all-time high of 7,126, after a 13% rally from its March 30 low, one of the fastest recoveries since 1982.
That tension is real, it is rational to notice it, and it will drive almost every conversation you have this week.
Your job is to be the person who holds both truths at once: sentiment at a 74-year low is serious, and corporate earnings are growing at double-digit rates for the sixth straight quarter. Neither cancels out the other.
With a relatively light calendar, that’s likely going to be the main conversation this week.
ADVISOR BRIEF: Week of April 20th
Data and science to help you anticipate client questions and concerns this week
Calendar:
March Retail Sales (Census Bureau) - Tuesday, April 21
April Flash S&P PMIs (S&P Global) - Thursday, April 23
Initial Jobless Claims (DOL) - Thursday, April 23
Q1 2026 earnings season ongoing - major tech companies and additional banks reporting throughout
Let’s break it down…
Most advisors are great in the room. The ones who grow are great everywhere else too. Not because they became marketers, but because they learned a few rules.
Every week, I’ll bring:
1) THE ADVISOR BRIEF: Data and science to help you anticipate client questions and concerns to build content that speaks to your audience’s needs
2) READ THIS: One thing worth reading, and exactly why it's worth your time
3) THE PLAYBOOK: The content play, the hook, the email, the AI tool, or the framework that makes you impossible to ignore. And the reason behind why it works, so you can use it like an advisor, not a marketer.
From a former JPMorgan Private Banker who reached millions every month explaining finance the way a trusted friend would.
Not financial advice.
Definitely not marketing advice.
Just what works.
Conversation 1: The stock market just hit a new high. What am I missing?
Why it matters: Clients have likely seen 3+ separate headlines this month telling them the economy might be heading into a recession. They have also seen their 401(k) balance at a number they have never seen before. Most of them do not know how to hold both of those things, and they are going to ask you.
This week's data sharpens the tension, with more stock moves, more earnings, and more economic data like retail sales that may not impact the stock market.
Some more context for your meetings:
Stock market at record highs. S&P 500 closed at 7,126 on Friday, April 17, a record, up 13% from its March 30 low, one of the fastest recoveries since 1982, according to JPMorgan.
Consumer sentiment hit a 74-year low in April, according to the University of Michigan. Year-ahead inflation expectations jumped to 4.8%, the largest one-month increase since the April 2025 Rose Garden tariff announcement.
Small business owners pulled back sharply in March. The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index fell 3.0 points to 95.8, sitting below the 52-year average of 98. The Uncertainty Index hit 92 against a historical average of 68. Capital spending plans dropped to 16%, the lowest level since November 2009.
Mixed messages with the job market. Big swings month-to-month, but it’s been steady, low hiring and low unemployment. The three-month average job gain is ~68,000 per month. Initial jobless claims have been low.
Recession probability estimates are rising, but not alarming. The Wall Street Journal's April survey of economists put the probability at 33%, up from 27% in January. Goldman Sachs puts it at 30%, JPMorgan at 35%, and Moody's at 49%. Polymarket prediction markets sit at 26%.
Biases at play:
Availability Heuristic: People estimate how likely something is by how easily an example comes to mind. This week, vivid recession headlines, high grocery prices, and neighbor conversations about layoffs are extremely mentally available, while the 13% stock rally and a 178,000-job report feel abstract and distant. Clients will overweight the story they can picture over the data they cannot.
Representativeness Heuristic: People judge a current situation by how closely it resembles a pattern they already know. "This feels like 2008" or "this feels like 2020" is the representativeness heuristic running. Clients are matching today's headlines - war, inflation fears, sentiment collapse - to prior crises and concluding the outcome will be the same.
Narrative Fallacy: People need a story that makes the world feel predictable. "The market is high because insiders know something the public doesn't" and "the economy is fake and about to crack" are both narratives that simplify complex, contradictory data into something emotionally coherent. Clients will gravitate toward whichever story confirms how they already feel.
Retiree and Pre-Retiree: Watching a record portfolio balance and feeling scared that a crash is right around the corner, that this is the peak, and that taking a distribution now locks in the wrong moment. The 2008 memory is vivid. They may want to stop withdrawals, shift to cash, or "just wait until things calm down."
"My neighbor says the market is fake right now. He says rich people are selling while retail investors hold the bag. Should I be worried?"
"I've been thinking about pulling some money out and just sitting in cash until things settle down. Is that crazy?"
Business Owner: Small business owners are not feeling the stock market rally. They are thinking about hiring challenges, credit lines, and whether their biggest customers are about to slow their orders. The stock market hitting a record feels like news from a different country.
"My biggest client told me they're cutting their budget for next year. That's not showing up anywhere in the market numbers. Who's right - Wall Street or Main Street?"
Young and Growing Family: This client hears "recession" and immediately thinks about job security. If one income disappears, the mortgage, the daycare bill, and the car payments do not pause. They are not asking about their portfolio; they are asking about their income.
"We were going to pause our 401(k) contributions for six months and build up our emergency fund. Given everything, does that make sense?"
Corporate Professional: The record market feels good on paper, but they are watching layoff announcements in their sector and wondering whether their unvested equity will survive the year. The tension between "my balance is high" and "my job feels shaky" is real and specific.
"The news keeps saying recession, but my 401(k) just hit an all-time high. I don't understand how both can be true."
Your clients are not confused. They are correctly noticing a genuine contradiction. Sentiment has never been this low in 74 years of survey data. The stock market has never been this high. Both are true. The job is not to resolve the contradiction for them but to explain the mechanism: stock prices reflect future corporate earnings, which are growing at double-digit rates. Sentiment measures how people feel about their daily financial lives, which are being squeezed by energy costs, inflation expectations, and real uncertainty about the path ahead.
READ THIS: Financial Advice in an Age of Longevity
One thing worth reading, and exactly why it’s worth your time
Financial Advice in an Age of Longevity
This is worth your next 10 minutes because Stanford is arguing that the real job of an advisor now is helping clients navigate 80–100‑year lives, not picking funds, which is exactly where human advice, behavioral coaching, and good communication beat low‑cost products and generic AI tools.
People are living much longer, but our financial systems and mental models are still built for a short, linear life: school, work, retire. The result is confusion and anxiety about how to fund and structure a life that may span 80–100 years.
True “good advice” now has to integrate work, health, caregiving, housing, and purpose across multiple phases of life, not just run a retirement calculator for age 65. That means more conversations and more ongoing guidance, not a one‑time plan.
The paper frames financial advice as a “life‑course partnership” where ongoing communication, context, and trust matter just as much as portfolio design. It explicitly highlights the need for advisors to help clients adapt plans as life circumstances and societal norms change.
The authors stress that technology and automation can help with projections and admin. Still, the core value is human: helping people make sense of trade‑offs, identity shifts, and uncertainty over a much longer, less predictable life.
The researchers’ conclusion: today’s AI is a brilliant pattern-matcher. It is not a general thinker. It thrives on problems that look like something it has seen before. It fails when the situation is genuinely new.
The advisor’s job looks nothing like an exam. It looks exactly like those games. A client walks in after a sudden layoff, a divorce, an unexpected inheritance, or a business offer they never planned for. There are no instructions. The goal is unclear. The rules keep changing. That is the work no algorithm can do yet, and this study is the proof.
STEAL THIS: Let AI Rip Apart Your Website So a Prospect Doesn't Have To
One practical thing you can use in your practice, in your content, or on a call
I was on a call with a new client this month, walking through their website, and within five minutes, I could see exactly why it wasn't converting.
It was written for the advisor, not the prospect. It described what they do. Not what the client walks away with. It answered the question "what is this?" before answering "why should I care?"
This is a perfect use case for AI to help you, even if you have no AI experience.
I’ve spent the last few weeks rebuilding the Share Scoops website for our launch. You like it? So, I’ve been deep in the back-and-forth with my friend Claude.
So I built a prompt that I just kept using over and over again to have AI audit my site for conversion. I used different models so that I wouldn’t get the same answer every time, and new chat threads too. Killed memory.
I’ll be honest, I just ran the site through the prompt again tonight as I was writing this post, and it shredded me again. Which means I'll be quietly updating things throughout the week like a surgeon mid-operation. Feel free to check back and see if you can spot the differences. Consider it a live case study.
Copy the prompt below, paste in your URL, attach any PDFs of your pages, and let it work. The output will be uncomfortable. That's the point.
Not marketing advice. Just what works.
THE PROMPT:
Act as a world-class conversion optimization strategist, financial services go-to-market expert, and behavioral science researcher. You are hypercritical, analytical, and assumption-hostile. Treat this as the worst-converting financial advisor website you've ever seen. Your job is to diagnose and fix every conversion leak.
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OBJECTIVE:
Audit my financial advisor website for conversion. My goal is to turn visitors — both cold prospects and warm referrals — into booked discovery calls or initial consultations. Identify exactly why prospects are not taking that action, and exactly what to change: copy, structure, proof, CTA strategy, page flow, friction, and on-page persuasion.
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CRITICAL CONTEXT — bake this into every recommendation:
The pain points that make someone SEARCH for an advisor are NOT the same pain points that make them HIRE one.
- Search-trigger pains = "I'm overwhelmed," "I got a windfall," "I'm about to retire," "I don't know if I'm on track."
- Hiring pains = "I need to trust this person," "I need to know they've helped someone like me," "I need to know this is worth the fee," "I don't want to feel sold to."
This website must address the hiring brain first — trust, specificity, credibility, and proof that you've helped people in their exact situation. If the site leads with your credentials and services before making the visitor feel understood and seen, you will lose the lead.
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MY WEBSITE:
[INSERT YOUR URL]
[ATTACH PDF SCREENSHOTS OF KEY PAGES IF AVAILABLE]
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MY IDEAL CLIENT PROFILE:
[Describe who you serve — e.g., "corporate professionals in their 40s approaching retirement, business owners considering a sale, young families building wealth for the first time"]
MY MAIN CONVERSION GOAL:
[e.g., "Book a discovery call" / "Schedule a free consultation" / "Complete a contact form"]
MY CURRENT BIGGEST CHALLENGE:
[e.g., "Referrals visit but don't book" / "Cold traffic bounces immediately" / "People read but never reach out"]
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RESEARCH REQUIREMENT:
Before auditing, research the following and cite what you find:
1. What makes a prospective client choose one financial advisor over another? What are the most common objections to booking that first call? (trust, fee skepticism, "I'm not sure I have enough to work with an advisor," fear of being sold to)
2. Analyze 3–5 comparable financial advisor websites or advisory firms. What are their positioning, proof patterns, CTA approaches, and messaging strategies? Where do they succeed or fail at converting visitors to consultations?
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AUDIT TASKS:
1. CONVERSION REALITY CHECK
- The single biggest reason a prospect would NOT book a call after visiting this site
- Top 15 conversion killers, ranked by impact (clarity, trust signals, specificity, proof, emotional resonance, CTA friction, page flow, jargon, credibility)
2. SPEED TESTS — write as the prospect's inner monologue:
- 5-second test: "What is this person? Who do they help? Why should I care? What do I do next?"
- 30-second test: "Is this advisor for someone like me? Can they actually solve my problem? Do they seem trustworthy?"
- 2-minute test: "Do I believe they've helped people in my situation? Do I feel understood? Do I trust them enough to hand over my financial life? Is there any reason to reach out today?"
3. TRUST vs. SALES ALIGNMENT AUDIT
- Map each major page section to whether it builds trust (specificity, proof, empathy, relatability) or accidentally triggers sales resistance (generic claims, jargon, credential-dumping, pushy CTAs)
- Where is the site accidentally making the visitor feel like a lead instead of a person?
- Rewrite the persuasion sequence: what must be established first, second, third before asking for the call
4. PROOF & CREDIBILITY AUDIT
- Are outcomes and social proof shown early and specifically? (client stories, transformation narratives, specific situations you've helped people navigate)
- Is proof too vague, too late, or hidden on a testimonials page nobody visits?
- What "minimum viable trust proof" must appear above the fold?
- What proof belongs on the homepage vs. deeper service pages?
5. OBJECTION HANDLING AUDIT
- Top 10 objections a prospect has before booking a call with a financial advisor
- Is each addressed on-page — explicitly or implicitly?
- Where and how should each objection be addressed (copy placement + framing)?
6. CTA AUDIT
- Are we asking for the right action at the right time for cold visitors vs. warm referrals?
- Is the ask (booking a call) appropriately de-risked and framed as low-pressure?
- Where is there friction, confusion, or a lack of clear next steps?
7. PAGE-BY-PAGE FIX PLAN
- What to keep, cut, move, and rewrite — minimal changes first, structural if necessary
- Exact replacement copy for any headlines, subheads, and CTAs you'd change
- Proof placement plan: what goes where, and why
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OUTPUT FORMAT (Markdown, no fluff):
A) Executive diagnosis — the core reason prospects aren't converting
B) Top conversion killers, ranked
C) Speed test transcripts (prospect's inner monologue)
D) Trust vs. Sales map — what the site currently triggers vs. what it should
E) Competitor/comparable site research + differentiation opportunities
F) Exact recommendations: Keep / Cut / Move / Rewrite by section, with replacement copy
G) 3–5 A/B tests to run, each with hypothesis and success metric
Tone: Hypercritical. No flattery. No vague "consider." If something is weak, name it and explain why.
Finish with: "If we only implement 5 changes this week to increase booked consultations, they are: …"
Take a deep breath and work through this step by step.See you next week,
Augustus
Augustus Christensen
Founder & CEO
