Strategy. The Investment Manager seeks to achieve the investment objective through investing in an actively managed, diversified, long-only portfolio comprised primarily of equity securities, principally common stocks, of small capitalization US companies. The Investment Manager considers small cap 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 $5.2 million to $15.0 billion as of March 31, 2025) . The Portfolio typically invests in 200 to 500 companies. Under normal circumstances, the Portfolio invests at least 80% of its assets in equity securities of small cap US companies. Equity securities also may include depositary receipts , including American Depositary … Show more… The Investment Manager seeks to achieve the investment objective through investing in an actively managed, diversified, long-only portfolio comprised primarily of equity securities, principally common stocks, of small capitalization US companies. The Investment Manager considers small cap 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 $5.2 million to $15.0 billion as of March 31, 2025) . The Portfolio typically invests in 200 to 500 companies. Under normal circumstances, the Portfolio invests at least 80% of its assets in equity securities of small cap US companies. Equity securities also may include depositary receipts , including American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), Global Depositary Receipts and European Depositary Receipts. The Portfolio may invest up to 20% of its assets in other securities which need not be equity securities of small cap US companies, including investments in larger US companies and in non-US companies, including securities of emerging markets companies traded on a US exchange. 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 subjective criteria into various quantitative formulas to make investment decisions based upon fundamental market data. 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 companys 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. To improve tax efficiency, the Portfolio may limit investments that have undesirable tax characteristics and may employ other tax-management techniques, such as adjusting the timing of trades, by relying in part on fundamental research and analytical judgements of the Investment Manager. Show less