operations

The APCO System is the bridge between your people and the different systems involved throughout your trading process.   To do this APCO maintains the most granular details.  When a manager employs a tax optimization strategy, APCO supplies all the tax components to the host accounting system.  When a broker fills a block in hundreds of small fills, APCO maintains a weighted average rollup.  When a manager generates a sale, APCO targets the specific registrations involved.  If your host accounting system supports principal & income assets, then APCO maintains separate assets for each.

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Security Movement and Control:  Throughout the day APCO uploads trade activity to the host accounting system via SMAC files that are native to the host.

  • Trade upload:  APCO adds account and tax details to the the broker fills and then sends them electronically to the host.
  • Confirmation: The host acknowledges receipt of the trades and a trade-by-trade status.  If the host rejected a trade for any reason, an alert is automatically sent to the operations group.
  • Reconciliation: Each night APCO re-confirms the pending trades with the host's transactions.  Automated notification is sent if any discrepancies are encountered.

 External Custodians

Custodian Report: The APCO System automatically prepares a daily execution report for each external custodian. The report includes a formatted PDF and a comma-delimited file that can be directly loaded into the external custodian's accounting system.  APCO can maintain each external custodian's native account number to facilitate the upload process.

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Full Refresh: To ensure that the APCO System remains synchronized to the host accounting system, we take a full refresh of data each night after the posting run. The advantage of this approach is that any changes made on the host accounting system will always flow down to APCO, greatly reducing the exposure of divergence between the systems which could lead to trading errors. The data extracted includes some of the following:

  • Account Master: includes account details, cash balances, gain/loss, etc.
  • Asset Master: includes cusip information, industry classifications (native to host), pricing, controls, etc.
  • Positions: All holdings for an account, including registration details.
  • Tax Lots: All tax lots for each position held.
  • Restrictions: All pledges placed by the host accounting system
  • Transactions: All trade activity in each account

 Wealth Managers and Traders

 Host Accounting System

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Additional Layer: APCO maintains any additional data that is not supported by the host accounting system.

  • Gain/Loss: For settle-date accounting systems, APCO will repost all pending trades to calculate an estimated trade date gain/loss balance for each account.
  • Open Orders: APCO will maintain the open shares of any order that is not completely filled by a broker on T+1 (e.g. thinly traded). The open shares are re-posted into each account so the managers will not double trade the following day. Just the remaining open shares will show on the trader's blotter in the morning. The trader can work this as a new order, including routing it to a new broker if desired.
  • Compliance: APCO always starts with any restrictions being passed by the accounting system, but then maintains extensive additional rules.

Trade Reports: The APCO System automatically prepares a daily trade report for each wealth manager.  This provides one more checkpoint for the manager to confirm their activity.  The traders can also run a daily execution report to track all the day's broker activity.