|
1 Year
|
3 Years
|
5 Years
|
10 Years
|
|
$ 44
|
$ 138
|
$ 241
|
$ 542
|
Portfolio Turnover
The Fund pays transaction costs, such as
commissions, when it buys and sells securities (or “turns over” its portfolio). A higher portfolio turnover rate may indicate higher transaction costs and may result in higher taxes when Fund shares are
held in a taxable account. These costs, which are not reflected in annual fund operating expenses or in the example, affect the Fund’s performance. During the most recent fiscal year, the Fund’s portfolio
turnover rate was 61% of the average value of its portfolio, excluding the value of portfolio securities received or delivered as a result of in-kind creations or redemptions of the Fund’s capital shares.
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 the 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 provide
long exposure to the performance of selected issuers in the U.S. non-investment-grade corporate bond (“junk bonds”) market that are deemed to have favorable fundamental and income characteristics while
seeking to manage interest rate risk through the use of short positions in U.S. Treasury securities (“U.S. Treasuries”).
The Index is comprised of long and
short positions. The long positions of the Index (the “Long Basket”) intends to replicate the WisdomTree U.S. High Yield Corporate Bond Index. The Index employs a multi-step process, which screens based on
fundamentals to identify bonds with favorable characteristics and then tilts to those individual securities which offer favorable income characteristics. The goal is to improve the risk-adjusted performance of
traditional market capitalization-weighted approaches of high-yield corporate bond indices.
The Long Basket of the Index is
comprised of corporate bonds of public issuers domiciled in the United States. To be eligible for inclusion in the Index, bonds must meet the following criteria: (i) pay fixed-rate coupons; (ii) have at least $500
million in par amount outstanding; (iii) have a remaining maturity of at least one year; and (iv) rated non-investment grade by Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s. In addition, the issuer cannot have
defaulted or be in distress. For the purposes of the Index, bonds issued under Regulation S are excluded from eligibility. All bonds are denominated in U.S. dollars.
The Long Basket of the Index
utilizes a “screen and tilt” rules-based approach to isolate bonds that have favorable fundamentals and tilts to those bonds with favorable income and valuation characteristics. Once the Index universe is
defined from the eligibility criteria, individual bonds are assigned a factor score against their broad sector peers (e.g., industrials, financials, utilities, consumer and energy) based on rules-based fundamental
metrics distinguishing cash flow characteristics and discards the securities with poor cash flow performance. Remaining bonds are ranked within each sector based on liquidity scores and then screened so that the bonds
receiving the lowest 5% of liquidity scores in each sector are removed from the Index. Each remaining bond is then assigned an income tilt score based on its probability of default relative to the other remaining
bonds in its sector. Income tilt scores are then used to determine a bond’s weight in the Index, with bonds receiving higher income tilt scores being more heavily weighted. Issuer exposure is capped at 2%, with
excess exposure distributed to the remaining bonds on a pro-rata basis.
The short positions of the Index
(the “Short Basket”) holds short positions in U.S. Treasuries (or futures providing exposure to U.S. Treasuries in the case of the Fund) that seek to correspond to a duration exposure matching the duration
of the Long Basket, with a targeted total duration exposure of approximately zero years (e.g., if the average duration of bonds in the Long Basket is approximately two years, the Short Basket will seek an average
duration of approximately two years among its short holdings of U.S. Treasuries, with an aggregate targeted Index duration of approximately zero 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. The Fund may also short U.S. Treasuries.