Our Services
Financial & Strategic Planning
Process Design Capital Management offers our clients services in the critical areas of retirement planning, wealth preservation and wealth transfer.
Our process is comprehensive, best in class and thorough. Each plan is customized and individualized for each family to make sure all of their objectives are met, given their financial assets.
Financial Independence
All of our clients want an answer to one very simple question, “Are we going to be OK?” This is the most fundamental question all of our clients have. It is our duty to provide the answer by using state of the art financial planning software, but most importantly, employing the 80 plus years of experience we have developed while implementing thousands of plans.
Risk Management
When we develop a plan, we first discover the client’s goals and then propose the appropriate allocation to achieve those goals. Depending on the client’s responses, we will either reduce or increase risk as the client begins to understand the impact of their decisions when they view the effect over the long term.
Only when risk tolerances have been determined are assets invested. The proposed investments are then continuously monitored to make sure they are appropriate for the client and the overall goal.
Our Compensation
We are fiduciaries for all of our clients. This means we must put our clients interests ahead of the firm and ahead of all of the firm’s employees. We have no financial incentive to recommend one product over another since we are a fee-only firm. We are paid on assets under management. Our clients can be confident that no matter what we recommend, we believe is in their best interests.
Asset and Liability Integration
We offer clients the ability to aggregate all of their assets and liabilities. This service allows our clients to go to one website to view their entire net worth in one, easy to access, extremely secure place on the web. Not only can clients view all of their financial assets and liabilities, but they also have the ability to place important documents such as wills and trusts, medical powers of attorney, passports etc. on the web. They then have the ability to view any of these documents anywhere in the world with internet access.
Investment/Portfolio Management
Risk management
We are risk managers. Our guiding philosophy is to preserve wealth and then grow it. We attempt to control portfolio risk in two ways. The first is through an understanding of the client’s risk tolerances and implementation of those preferences in the portfolio. The second layer of risk management is our assessment of market risk through the use of technical and fundamental analysis.
Although no one can predict market tops and bottoms, we believe it is possible to ascertain whether market risk is high, low or something in between. We also believe we can access whether we should be in wealth accumulation or wealth preservation mode and have the ability to govern our portfolio accordingly.
The process
We believe that in order to achieve reasonable rates of return in any investment climate, a process needs to have been put in place and adhered to. It consists of six steps:
- asset allocation and client risk analysis.
- Market analysis.
- Sector analysis.
- Fundamental research.
- Technical research.
- Monitoring and follow-up.
Portfolio construction, implementation and monitoring
Once client risk analysis and asset allocation is determined, the portfolio is constructed beginning with step two of the above process. The process we use helps us in a number of ways. From a market perspective, it helps us assess overall market risk. Is risk high or low or somewhere in between? It also helps us determine whether we are in wealth accumulation or wealth preservation mode once we have decided that risk is reasonable and that we are in wealth accumulation mode, we moved to the sector analysis and determine the same thing that we did when we assess the overall market. Then we conduct fundamental analysis on an inventory of investments that we have selected. Once we have selected the investments that we like fundamentally, we conduct technical research to make our final selections. Finally, we monitor and follow-up on our decisions, eliminating investments that have moved away and the reasons that they were purchased as well as managing any gains in our investment. A plan must be in place for success as well as failure in our investment selections.
Securities used
Equities: we generally use exchange traded funds, both market ETF’s and sector ETF’s as well as individual stocks.
Cash/fixed income: money market funds, exchange traded funds and individual bonds.
In some instances, we will also buy mutual funds when we cannot find a suitable ETF or individual stock or bond.
As portfolio managers we attempt to stack as many odds in our favor as possible by doing this we believe that we can help our clients succeed as investors over a market cycle.