Behind the Scenes

Many things happen inside the offices of DCM every day to ensure your portfolio is doing what you and your family need from it.

Daily Reconciliation

DCM does not hold its clients assets. Those investments always reside with a custodian (TD Ameritrade, Raymond James, or others). We do maintain a system that mirrors each of our clients’ accounts. You can think of it as the custodian being the bank and our system being the checkbook. First thing every morning, we reconcile what the custodians say is in each account –including all of the transactions that happened the day before - with what our system shows. If there are any inconsistencies, we take care of them before the start of business that day. Through this process, DCM clients know that someone is carefully watching the details of their accounts every day.

Investment Committee Meetings

While every account is managed individually at DCM, we are constantly making “global” decisions that affect all of our clients.

The DCM Investment Policy Committee meets every Monday to determine how major economic trends and world events will affect the stocks and bonds markets. From those conclusions, the Investment Policy Committee makes adjustments to each of our model portfolios (described in Our Approach). Those global decisions to change the model portfolios immediately get implemented on a “local” level. That means, no portfolio under our care automatically buys or sells based upon a global decision. Each portfolio is evaluated individually to determine whether or not it should buy or sell the security being changed in the model portfolio.

Portfolio Quality Assurance (PQA)

DCM, through a proprietary software application, is continually appraising each portfolio on how closely it conforms to the model portfolio it is intended to follow. This process is aptly named Portfolio Quality Assurance or PQA. PQA allows us to continually adjust and adapt each portfolio while still upholding clients’ specific needs, wishes, and concerns. Shortly after the end of each quarter, the entire firm monitors PQA scores for each management style and each Portfolio Manager. While PQA allows for variations from the model portfolios depending upon clients’ particular situation, Portfolio Managers know the whole firm is monitoring the job they are doing.

Performance Measures Meetings

The end of each quarter signals to the DCM staff that it is time to pull our heads out of our work and see how we are doing. During DCM’s quarterly Performance Measures Meetings, we review every aspect of how DCM is doing. This includes everything from the returns our investments are producing to a detailed look at every contact we had with our clients – What concerns arose for our clients during the quarter? Did we do anything to displease a client? Did we do anything that was particularly pleasing? Based upon what we discover during each of these meetings, we make adjustments, changing things that cause concern for clients and doing more of those things that help us to better serve them.