expenses or in the example, affect the Fund’s performance. During the
most recent fiscal year, the Fund’s portfolio turnover rate was 134% of the average value of its portfolio, including TBA Transactions (as defined below), and 59% of the average value of its portfolio (excluding TBA Transactions).
Principal Investment Strategies of the Fund
The Fund employs a “passive management” – or indexing – investment approach designed to track the performance of the Index. The
Fund generally uses a representative sampling strategy to achieve its investment objective, meaning it generally will invest in a sample of the securities in the Index whose risk, return and other characteristics resemble the risk, return and other
characteristics of the Index as a whole. Under normal circumstances, at least 80% of the Fund’s total assets (exclusive of collateral held from securities lending) will be invested in component securities of the Index and investments that have
economic characteristics that are substantially identical to the economic characteristics of such component securities.
The Index is designed to broadly capture the U.S. investment
grade, fixed income securities market while seeking to enhance yield within desired risk parameters and constraints. Rather than re-weight individual securities, the Index uses a rules-based approach to re-weight subgroups of the Bloomberg Barclays
US Aggregate Index with the aim of earning a higher yield while broadly retaining the risk characteristics of the Bloomberg Barclays US Aggregate Index. The 20 subgroups identified in the Bloomberg Barclays US Aggregate Index reflect the different
risk dimensions of investment grade securities such as sector (asset class) exposure (i.e., treasuries, agency, credit, and securitized), interest rate risk (i.e.,
duration) and credit risk (i.e., spread). Yield can typically be increased by shifting exposure along any of a number of these risk dimensions and re-weighting the subcomponents of the Index. At the security
level, the Index draws from the universe defined by the Bloomberg Barclays US Aggregate Index, which consists of investment grade debt securities denominated in U.S. dollars. To be eligible for inclusion in the Index, debt securities must have at
least $250 million in par amount outstanding with the exception of asset-backed securities and commercial mortgage-backed securities which must have an original deal size of $500 million, a minimum tranche size of $25 million, and at least $300
million of the original transaction still outstanding. The Index consists of U.S. Treasuries and U.S. Government-related bonds (e.g., obligations of the U.S. Government or its agencies or instrumentalities),
corporate bonds, mortgage-backed pass- through securities, commercial mortgage-backed securities, and asset-backed securities that are publicly offered for sale in the United States. Index components are U.S. dollar-denominated debt securities with
fixed rate coupons that have at least one year to final maturity.
The Index segments the eligible universe of U.S. investment
grade fixed income securities into subgroups defined by sector, quality and maturity characteristics. There are 20 defined subgroups, with six subgroups covering the treasury and agency sectors, nine covering the credit markets, and the remaining
five covering securitized securities. The Index employs a proprietary weighting methodology that seeks to enhance yield by allocating more weight to subgroups with higher yields while maintaining defined risk constraints designed to mitigate
volatility and turnover drift from the eligible U.S. investment grade fixed income universe. Subgroups with higher yields are identified based on a subgroup’s yield to worst measurements, rather than its yield to maturity. Yield to worst
refers to the lowest potential yield that can be received on a bond without issuer default. The Index uses yield to worst measurements to determine the yield of each subgroup, except the three mortgage-backed securities subgroups, which use yield to
worst calculations of Treasury bonds whose maturities match the average life of its mortgage securities plus their option-adjusted spreads. However, to retain the broad risk characteristics of the Bloomberg Barclays US Aggregate Index, the Index
also employs constraints that include caps on tracking error volatility, duration, sector and subgroup weights, and turnover. The Index’s constraints are capped relative to the constraints of the Bloomberg Barclays US Aggregate Index. For
example, the total weight of the subgroups in each of the four sectors of the Index – treasuries, agency, credit, and securitized
– cannot deviate from their weights in the Bloomberg Barclays US Aggregate Index by more than 20%, 10%, 20% and 20%, respectively. The weights are determined at the
sub-group level (negative weights for a sub-group are not permitted) and passed down to the individual security level, where each security’s weight is equal to the subgroup weight multiplied by its market capitalization weight within the
subgroup. The Index is rebalanced on a monthly basis.
The duration range of the Index is expected to be within one
year of the duration of the Bloomberg Barclays US Aggregate Index. Historically, such universe has had a duration range between approximately three and seven years. Duration is a measure used to determine the sensitivity of a portfolio to changes in
interest rates with a longer duration portfolio being more sensitive to changes in interest rates. For example, the value of a fund with a portfolio duration of seven years would be expected to drop by 7% for every 1% increase in interest
rates.
A significant portion of the bonds represented in
the Index are U.S. agency mortgage-backed pass-through securities. U.S. agency mortgage-backed pass-through securities are securities issued by entities such as Government