Under normal circumstances, the Portfolio invests at least 80% of its assets in equity securities of small capitalization U.S. companies. The Investment Manager considers “small capitalization companies” to be those companies that, at the time of initial purchase by the Portfolio, have market capitalizations within the range of companies included in the Russell 2000 Index (ranging from approximately $4.4 million to $38.0 billion as of March 31, 2026). Equity securities include common stocks, depositary receipts, including ADRs, Global Depositary Receipts and European Depositary Receipts. The Portfolio considers a company or issuer to be a “U.S. company” if: (i) the company/issuer is organized under the laws of or is domiciled in the U.S. or maintains its principal place of business in the U.S.; (ii) the security, or security of such company/issuer, is traded principally in the U.S.; or (iii) during the most recent fiscal year of the

company/issuer, the company/issuer derived at least 50% of its revenues or profits from goods produced or sold, investments made, or services performed in the U.S. or that has at least 50% of its assets in the U.S.

The Investment Manager seeks to achieve the investment objective through investing in an actively managed, diversified, long-only portfolio comprised primarily of equity securities of small capitalization U.S. companies. The Portfolio typically invests in 200 to 600 companies.

The Portfolio may invest up to 20% of its assets in other securities which need not be equity securities of small cap U.S. companies, including investments in larger U.S. companies and in non-U.S. companies.

The Investment Manager actively manages the Portfolio using its proprietary investment strategy that creates and applies fundamental and quantitative techniques into a fully systematic process, which is designed to convert fundamental criteria and market data into various quantitative formulas to make investment decisions. The Investment Manager terms this its “Automated Fundamental Analyst” investment framework, which involves steps including the following:

·identification of a fundamental opportunity, a recurring market inefficiency where the Investment Manager believes that investors are not fully incorporating the impact of a company’s changing operating fundamentals and/or attractive valuations;

·converting this market observation into quantified conditions utilizing proprietary process, knowledge and techniques;

·attempting to validate the observation through extensive proprietary testing that includes historical data, minimum targeted return objectives and persistence hurdles;

·through the operation of each Automated Fundamental Analyst, a number of securities are identified; and

·the securities selection process is implemented systematically into automated daily operations.

The Investment Manager selects investments for the Portfolio by applying the foregoing securities selection process to an investable universe of all publicly-traded equity securities, with a focus on small cap companies. However, Automated Fundamental Analysts, which may change over time, may be applied to the broad market or specific to a particular sector or industry. In addition, the selection process described above is not sequential, and certain criteria may be given more importance than others. Target position sizes are determined at the time of investment based on the input of one or more Automated Fundamental Analysts and subsequently monitored on an ongoing basis.