How should advisors and fund firms react to the recent pain in the markets? That's what Eric Lansky and David Yazdan want to help fundsters and RIAs figure out. To that end, the two fund execs have restarted their 10-year-old brainchild, Remora, to help advisors and fund firms connect and share ideas.

"We needed to foster a more symbiotic relationship," explained Lansky, who recently joined Vice Fund manager USA Mutuals as president (see MFWire, 2/2/2009). Lansky credits the name to his background as a biology major -- a remora is a kind of fish that attaches to larger sea creatures like whales and lives with them symbiotically (not as a parasite).

"We were trying to figure out a way to bolster the relationship between the mutual fund firms and the RIA community," said Yazdan, who is a senior manager director at Third Avenue. "Investors are really frozen, obviously shell-shocked from the market correction."

For Remora's first event, Lansky and Yazdan gathered about 50 advisors, fundsters and media types together on a conference call to talk about "best practices" and possibly creating an "industry message" -- Lansky and Yazdan envision perhaps launching an ad campaign encouraging investors to focus on the long-term benefits of investing, perhaps highlighting the security offered by mutual funds (contrasting that with the Madoff scandal).

"Now is a great time to increase your exposure to risk assets," Yazdan said. "We're trying to help RIAs convey a message."

Once upon a time, Remora ran quarterly, in-person meetings in New York City, and Lansky and Yazdan hope to restart such meetings again on a semi-annual basis.

"We want to remind investors that mutual funds provide all the protections a clients in terms of comfort," Yazdan said. 

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