Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA)


As your personal chief financial officer our aim is to help you achieve your financial and life goals.  Expert planning is critical, but so is expert implementation.  That’s where fund manager Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA) comes into play. 

Long-term investors don’t speculate.  They define their personal goals, consider the academic evidence on market investing, and invest accordingly. DFA not only shares our beliefs on this, but they have been a champion in developing funds according to the matching ideals of cost- and tax-managed, efficient structure.  This is one reason we turn to their solutions for the core of most of our clients’ portfolios.

You may never have heard of DFA, because they don’t widely advertise their services to the public.  They’d rather invest their time and energy expertly managing their funds, turning to a select group of advisors, including Key Financial Solutions, to introduce their funds to well-suited individual investors.

To provide additional points of distinction, DFA:

  • Heeds more than a half-century of academic research in informing their strategies.
  • Manages their funds “passively,” and relatively low-cost – similar to index funds but with more purity in their construction according to specific, scientifically defined risk factors.
  • Avoids attempts to predict the future by picking individual stocks or timing the market.
  • Enables custom, globally diversified portfolio construction and accurate reflection of investor risk tolerance by offering US and international stock funds with various size and growth tilts. 
  • For taxable portfolios, offers several tax-managed stock funds, designed to minimize capital gain and dividend distributions.

Here are some notable articles about the firm:

“Finding Success, Passionate Followers in Tow,” New York Times, 2011

“Can You Beat the Market? It’s a $100 Billion Question,” New York Times, 2008

“The Dimensions of a Pioneering Strategy,” The Wall Street Journal, 2006

“The Index Insurgents,” Forbes, 2006

“The Best Fund Family You’ve Never Heard of — and Why It Doesn’t Want Your Money,”  TheStreet.com, 2002

“DFA Funds: Hard to Buy, Easy to Own,” CNBC, 2002