Monday's bloodletting in the stock market was swiftly followed by a boom in newspaper advertisements aimed at skittish investors.
Fidelity Investments of Boston, the biggest fund manager in the nation, managing roughly $635 billion of assets, referred directly to the Dow's 512-point drop in an ad in The Wall Street Journal Tuesday.
The tag line read: "Today is one of those days when experience matters most."
A Fidelity spokesman said it routinely uses current events as grist for ads aimed at investors. "It's an educational message that's a constant," he said.
A few weeks earlier Fidelity rolled out a guide titled "Investing in Volatile Markets," supported by an ad campaign.
Famed fund manager Peter Lynch was a principal author of the guide, the spokesman noted.
Prudential Securities was also quick to turn around ads after Monday's decline. Its campaign, featured in The New York Times this week, touted capital preservation and suggested alternative investments such as cash deposits, Treasury bonds, and money market funds.
In its ads Prudential also included results from an investor survey it had started to cobble together Aug. 27, when the Dow took a 357-point dive.
Among the results were that 64.5% of investors said they are paying more attention to the market in current conditions, though 90.6% said they would not make major portfolio changes.
"The intent is to put a mirror up in front of the American public," said Michael J. Hines, vice president of marketing and communications for Prudential Insurance Co. of America, the parent of Prudential Securities.
The survey questioned 444 retail investors around the country.
