Brendan McCurdy: Three tips on planning for a market pullback

As the market recovers, I have been making the first-quarter portfolio-review rounds with our IFA clients and there is a common question repeatedly raised: "What should we be doing to prepare our clients for the next downturn?" This question is often followed by two more: "Should we move to cash?" and "Is it time to de-risk?" Tricky questions indeed. Not only are these things tough to do well consistently - not that ‘tough' should scare us off, of course - but trying and failing can also be downright harmful. As an example, Morningstar calculates a statistic it calls ‘Investor Return', w...