The Fund invests, under normal circumstances, at least 80% of its net assets plus any borrowings for investment purposes in equity securities of companies in emerging markets, excluding China. This investment policy may be changed by the Fund upon 60 days’ prior written notice to shareholders.

The Adviser considers a company to be an emerging market company if it is organized or maintains its principal place of business in an emerging market country. The Adviser considers a country to be an emerging market country if the country is represented in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index or another widely recognized emerging markets index. As of November 30, 2023, the MSCI Emerging Markets

Index consisted of the following 24 emerging markets countries: Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Korea, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Emerging markets are often characterized by low to middle income but with rapid economic growth, as well as financial liberalization and institutional development. The Adviser excludes from the Fund’s universe companies organized or maintaining their principal place of business in China.

The equity securities in which the Fund invests are primarily common stocks and depositary receipts, including unsponsored depositary receipts, but may also include preferred stock and securities of other investment companies. The Fund may invest in securities of companies with any market capitalization with a particular focus on mid- and large-capitalization securities.

The Fund is primarily made up of stocks from emerging markets excluding China that are selected using a “quantamental approach” using a combination of quantitative and fundamental investment strategies. In quantamental investment strategies, investment decisions are made by combining large amounts of data and computer models. The Adviser’s quantitative investment model allocates more weight to stocks for which the model identifies the potential for higher future returns, taking into account risk (i.e., risk-adjusted returns), and less weight to stocks for which the model identifies the potential for lower future risk-adjusted returns. The Adviser’s portfolio management team may adjust portfolio weights for the Fund based on their own analysis of the securities in the Fund’s investment universe in order to enhance evaluations made by the quantitative model. In addition to excluding stocks in specific countries as a result of the Fund’s investment models, the Adviser may avoid investing in a given country for which the transaction costs of investing exceed the benefits of investing in that country. Due to its investment strategy, the Fund may buy and sell securities frequently.

The Adviser uses data from a variety of sources, including data purchased from vendors and data accessed by the Adviser from alternative sources (e.g., data collected from public websites). Such data are collected at varying frequencies (e.g., daily price data, quarterly financial statements) and considered over varying horizons, ranging from months to years, depending on the nature of the data in question. The Adviser employs a proprietary data cleaning process, whereby data obtained from vendors and other sources is inspected for errors, processed to make information obtained from different sources useful in comparing various companies, sectors, and markets, and formatted for inclusion in

the Adviser’s database and for use in its models. The Adviser monitors its data and models through a combination of automated and manual checks. The Adviser pays for data used in the strategy’s models.

The Adviser also takes into account certain environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) criteria in choosing and weighting investments in the Fund, basing its evaluation on a combination of third-party data and proprietary metrics. ESG considerations that will impact the quantitative ranking of stocks may include (but are not limited to) evaluations of firms’ financial reporting practices (e.g., reducing the weight of companies suspected of manipulative accounting) and the degree of alignment between a firm’s managers and shareholders (e.g., whether managers are prone to wastefully reinvest the company’s earnings rather than distributing earnings to shareholders). Governance characteristics will lead to either an increase or decrease of weight in a stock, depending on whether the Adviser determines that the company exhibits good or bad governance, respectively, on the basis of that characteristic. In addition, the Fund will screen out the stock of companies that are identified by the Adviser as having extremely poor environmental performance (e.g., firms with exceedingly high CO2 emissions, energy intensity, water intensity, and waste generation). Such exclusions will be made regardless of the expected future returns of stocks failing to meet the Fund’s ESG screening criteria. Because the Fund’s universe of stocks is large relative to the number of companies expected by the Adviser to fail their ESG criteria, the Adviser does not expect screening on ESG to have a significant impact on the Fund’s ability to meet its investment objective.