GIGB

About GIGB

The Fund seeks to achieve its investment objective by investing at least 80% of its assets (exclusive of collateral held from securities lending) in securities included in its underlying index. The Index is a rules-based index that is designed to measure the performance of investment grade, corporate bonds denominated in U.S. dollars (“USD”) that meet certain liquidity and fundamental screening criteria. As of November 30, 2024, there were 3,388 constituents in the Index and the Index had a weighted average maturity of 10.83 years. The Index is a custom index that is owned and calculated by FTSE Fixed Income LLC (“FTSE”), a trading name of the London Stock Exchange Group plc and its group undertakings (collectively, the “LSE Group” or the “Index Provider”). The Index is based on the FTSE US Broad Investment-Grade (USBIG®) Corporate Index (the “Reference Index”) using concepts developed with Goldman Sachs Asset Management, L.P. (“GSAM”). Given the Fund’s investment objective of attempting to track the Index, the Fund does not follow traditional methods of active investment management, which may involve buying and selling securities based upon analysis of economic and market factors. The Index Provider constructs the Index in accordance with a rules-based methodology that involves two steps. Step 1 In the first step, the Index Provider defines a universe of potential index constituents (the “Universe”) by applying specified criteria to the constituents of the Reference Index. The Reference Index includes investment grade corporate bonds that have a minimum of one year to maturity and are rated at least BBB- by S&P Global Ratings (“S&P”) or Baa3 by Moody’s Investors Service, Inc. (“Moody’s”). Only corporate bond constituents of the Reference Index that have a minimum of $750 million outstanding and a minimum issuer size of $2 billion are included in the Universe. A maturity bucketing process is used to approximate the average effective duration of the Reference Index. Step 2 In the second step, the Index Provider applies a fundamental screen to the Universe. Issuers are first grouped into three broad industry groups: financials, industrials and utilities. Within each industry group, issuers are measured by two fundamental factors, operating margin and leverage. The Index Provider ranks each issuer based on the two fundamental factors, equally weighted. The Index is constructed by including the highest ranking eligible securities in each industry group, screening out lowest ranking eligible securities. The Index is normally rebalanced (i) monthly on the last business day of each month, to account for changes in liquidity, rating or maturity, and (ii) quarterly, to account for updates to the constituents on the basis of the fundamental factors (as described above). The Investment Adviser uses a representative sampling strategy to manage the Fund. “Representative sampling” is an indexing strategy in which the Fund invests in a representative sample of constituent securities that has a collective investment profile similar to that of the Index. The securities selected for investment by the Fund are expected to have, in the aggregate, investment characteristics, fundamental characteristics and liquidity measures similar to those of the Index. The Fund may or may not hold all of the securities in the Index. The Fund may concentrate its investments (i.e., hold more than 25% of its total assets) in a particular industry or group of industries to the extent that the Index is concentrated. The degree to which components of the Index represent certain sectors or industries may change over time.