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 provided by CenterSquare Investment Management LLC (“CenterSquare”). The Index selects constituents from a parent universe of global equity securities, including American Depositary Receipts (“ADRs”), of listed real estate investment trusts (“REITs”) and companies identified as being significantly real estate related. Real estate-related companies are companies that derive at least 75% of their revenue from real estate rental revenue or from supplying goods or services to commercial or residential property owners that relate to the development, management, maintenance, lease, rental, or sale of such real estate. To be eligible for inclusion in the Index, a security must: (i) have a market capitalization of at least $500 million; (ii) have a 90-day average trading volume above $4 million per day; and (iii) list shares on a national stock exchange in the United States, Australia, Canada, Europe (i.e., Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, or the United Kingdom), Hong Kong, Israel, or Singapore, or on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

The eligible constituents are then further screened based on a proprietary technology score (described below) and a leverage screening to identify REITs and companies identified as being significantly real estate related, which are exposed to the technology and science-related aspects of the “new economy.” The “new economy” is comprised of companies associated with cloud computing, logistics and supply chain management, and life sciences. The Index is comprised of companies that derive at least 50% of their revenues or profits from, or invest at least 50% of their assets in, products or services related to the new economy.

Each constituent is assigned a technology score based on various factors, including (1) the amount of revenue generated from research and development (R&D), telecommunications, or other activities related to the technology and life science industries, either directly from the company’s operations or indirectly through its lease of real estate to tenants engaged in such activities, and (2) the extent to which the constituent and/or its tenants enable or are exposed to the sciences, e-commerce, and/or new economy logistics, including supply chain and warehouse management. The Index selects the highest scoring constituents for inclusion in the Index by performing analysis and assigning a value to pre-defined evaluation criteria for each constituent.

Constituents are then further screened to eliminate highly levered companies with debt to total market capitalization above 70%.

The output of the above screening process creates the Index’s investable universe of securities. In accordance with its rules-based methodology, the Index selects the constituents with the highest technology scores for inclusion in the Index. The initial weights of the remaining constituents are determined by the free float market capitalizations of the securities. These weights are then adjusted using a formula that reweights the constituents based on a combination of the technology score described above and the constituent’s growth and valuation rank (collectively referred to as the “New Economy Score”). As a result, securities with strong growth and/or value characteristics, in accordance with the Index, are overweighted in the Index based on their New Economy Scores. The weight of any single security in the Index is limited to no more than 7.5% at the time of the Index rebalance.

The Index is reconstituted and rebalanced on a semi-annual basis.

The Index concentrates in REITs and companies in the real estate sector.