You're facing investor inquiries during market instability. How will you handle the pressure?

As an investor, there are many ways to keep yourself informed. The easiest and most obvious is by reading the news and regularly engaging your network to have a strong understanding of the current market and recent developments. As an investor you should anticipate certain questions, you should also be able to demonstrate your expertise and provide the right kind of context and information. Most importantly, you can alleviate pressure by been proactive and starting a discussion about long-term risks, opportunities, and plans. This can be done by organising meetings, events, or even through webinars and newsletters. Being transparent with stakeholders by anticipating their questions is a great way to alleviate pressure and build trust.

To handle investor inquiries during market instability, stay informed. Keep up-to-date with the latest market trends, economic indicators, and relevant news. Regularly review the performance and strategic adjustments of your portfolio companies. Prepare detailed, data-driven updates to address investor concerns and questions confidently. Stay transparent about challenges and the measures being taken to mitigate risks. By staying informed and proactive, you can provide clear, accurate information that reassures investors and demonstrates your competence in managing through uncertainty.

Reassuring investors during market stability starts with communication, and much more than you normally do. Firstly you need to make sure you keep up with market trend which includes breaking this down between long term and short term trends. You want to make sure that you can anticipate the questions that are likely to arise and have answers to them. This demonstrates expertise and knowledge, both important components when trying to reassure investors. You want to be as transparent as possible and make sure you focus on potential solutions, keeping the focus on the long term goals. Empathy is important as well as being assertive with sharing your knowledge and most importantly, make sure your investors' questions are fully answered.

Being transparent about your challenges, and maybe even occasional failures, is not about showing your weaknesses. As adults and experienced professionals we all know that sh*t happens. Being transparent about it is showing that you're not afraid of facing challenges and, most importantly, you know how to deal with adversity. This underlines your resilience, which is probably more important than trying to know everything.

You need to make sure you are fully transparent at all times and that you show all performance figures for both the losers as well as the winners, including a breakdown as to why each investment has performed how it has. You need to go one step further and compare each investment vs its relative benchmark so that investors know if the investments you've chosen have outperformed or underperformed. The reason this is important is because an investment might be down -5% but if its relative benchmark is down -10%, you've outperformed even though it's at a loss. You will also want to find any past data to see if similar scenarios have occurred in the past and how the market reacted. This will help put the current situation into perspective.

At a minimum, you want to send quarterly valuations including the fact sheets of each fund your investor holds, along with market commentary of what's happened in the past quarter and what is on the horizon. If markets have performed exceptionally bad, you want to send out additional communication on a regular basis to help deal with any concerns your investors may have. When doing this, you want to invite your investors to contact you if they want to discuss anything in more detail. This shows that you care and are on top of the situation and your investors will respect you for it and won't be as concerned if you've addressed their queries. Never wait for investors to communicate with you firstly, always be proactive and do it first

Reaffirming strategies is extremely important as during market downturns, its easy for investors to point the finger and forget what the investment strategy was designed to do. You want to break down your investment strategy based on asset allocation, and how these assets tend to perform during market downturns, as well as how they perform when markets recover. The idea is to explain that markets go up and down, and even when everything looks bleak, there's always a light at the end of the tunnel if you stay invested, you just need to remember to keep a long term view on investing and not try to make irrational decisions in times of extreme market volatility.

Building strong relationships requires more than good performance, it requires you to understand deeply what your investors are trying to achieve. You need to understand their strengths and weaknesses so that you can help them during times of uncertainty. Whenever your investors make specific comments surrounding anything investment related, make a note of it so you can build up a personalised profile of your investor, and refer back to these points as your relationship builds. This will show that you are always listening, and you have your investors' best interests at heart.