Dina Fliss • Milwaukee, WI
Global View Capital Management, Ltd.

Dina Fliss is president and chief investment strategist of Global View Capital Management, Ltd. (GVCM), a name that is certainly reflective of her outlook on investments and navigation of today’s financial environment.

GVCM, an SEC-registered investment advisory firm, formally began operations in April 2011. It has now grown to over 150 financial advisors throughout the U.S. and Canada, with approximately $175 million in assets under discretionary management.

Fliss has demonstrated a strong affinity for global economics and macro monetary concepts for over 30 years. She has been an avid student of “mankind’s history with money” since her college days studying math, physics, and economics, and indeed today has an extensive personal collection of many classic and modern books on economic theory and a wide range of financial topics.

Her interest in global thinking goes far beyond the purely academic, as Fliss has been a very active participant within the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan, grassroots, Washington-based organization dedicated to “educating the public about the causes and consequences of federal budget deficits, the long-term challenges facing America’s unsustainable entitlement programs, and how to build a sound foundation for economic growth.”

This grounding in broad economic issues also informs her day-to-day advisory business. Fliss says one of the driving forces behind the creation of GVCM, with her husband, Dean, is the fact that “we are all more globally connected than ever before, and macro structures are changing. We are trying to build the model of the future.”

Fliss says she and her husband represent two distinct and complementary skill sets: She is the “left-brain” of the equation, highly analytic and process-driven, while Dean excels at fast-paced marketing and business development.

Their vision, already firmly in place, “is to create an extremely client-centric organization, built by advisors for advisors. We want highly motivated people who want to make a difference in their clients’ lives, while working in a highly entrepreneurial, equity-sharing, and open-architecture environment.”

This vision also includes a heavy emphasis on active portfolio management, which Fliss says is essential to “finding a different way than conventional wisdom—which often is not so wise—to manage money.”

“We want highly motivated people who want to make a difference in their clients’ lives, while working in a highly entrepreneurial, equity-sharing, and open-architecture environment.”

Fliss has been researching and developing model portfolios and actively managed strategies since 1995, with deep immersion in the science of modern portfolio theory. From 2003 to 2010, she was an executive director of an SEC-registered firm, where she co-developed active strategies and identified and vetted third-party money managers specializing in active management.

While fluent in modern portfolio theory, she says her eyes were truly opened by the tech-bubble crash of 2001. She says, “Asset allocation models failed us, and it was my personal wake-up call.” Fliss realized then with certainty “that there must be a better way than buy-and-hold investing, no matter how sophisticated the allocation model.” She says, “We need the discretionary ability to make rapid moves with client portfolios in times of volatile markets and go to cash fast if necessary. The answer is not to just put our arms around clients and tell them to hold on, but to actively manage at all times, especially in times of market crisis.”

Fliss and her team of advisors start every client assessment and financial plan from a risk-management perspective. As she says, “Our first mandate is a risk mandate. Our portfolios do not behave like the S&P 500, nor should they. We may occasionally somewhat lag behind the overall market in times of a very strong bullish run, but we do have trend-following leveraged strategies that help to diminish that differential.”

She explains, “Our model really shines during times of market stress, as our process and strategies are designed to prevent client drawdowns exceeding 10% for the vast majority of clients who have moderate risk profiles. We are most gratified that the longer clients have been with us, the more they appreciate our active and well-diversified investment style.”

As one might imagine, given Fliss’ quantitative and analytic approach, her firm’s palette of active management strategies is wide-ranging, covering everything from long/short tactical strategies in multiple asset classes to high-yielding income-producing approaches. Global View maintains critically important relationships with third-party money managers, as well as having developed their own strategies and “fund of funds.”

No matter the investment vehicles ultimately utilized, GVCM’s investing philosophy is to follow a rules-based, primarily quantitative discipline that employs offensive and defensive tools to manage risk. Fliss seeks to provide clients with downside protection in falling markets and deliver higher risk-adjusted returns over a full market cycle of many years, encompassing a range of market conditions.

Their third-party and open-architecture strategies cover both the globe and many different asset classes, including tactical, rotational, long/short directional, and volatility-hedging strategies, all of which may have numerous substrategies.

For Fliss and team, this active management arsenal of tools provides the ability to move quickly as market conditions may warrant, and they believe that it is incumbent upon them “to find different, risk-managed ways to manage money in today’s ever-changing global markets.” She says, “Risk has to be our very first consideration.”

Fliss adds, “I want to do the very best to help all of our clients meet their long-term objectives, and, if you will forgive the expression, bring as many as possible onto the Noah’s Ark of active management.

“There will be another major market displacement, and it is not a question of if, but when, and it could well be worse than the last two that we have seen. Our goal is to help design, grow, and protect the personal economies of families from all over the world, using an active management approach. This is a 21st-century model we are bringing to all of our stakeholders.”