The Astor ETF Port 100 Index is an index of popular, active, and liquid exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The proliferation of ETFs over the past few years has given investors a greater ability to manage their portfolios to achieve very specific goals that were once quite challenging. In the past, portfolios would generally consist of equities and bonds in some percentage weighting depending on an investors risk tolerance and return objectives. This portfolio would have limitations in achieving desired long-term investment goals. It is clear that an investment portfolio would benefit from exposure to more assets beyond the traditional stocks and bonds. ETFs have done an excellent job of creating securities that track assets other then stocks and bonds. The Astor ETF Port 100 Index was created to track the most widely traded and most liquid securities regardless of the asset they are tracking. The index includes all ETFs that meet or exceed the following criteria: (1) $100 million in total fund assets; (2) 100,000 shares of average daily volume over the past 100 days; and (3) 100 days of trading.

We believe these criteria are relevant to the success, demand, and viability and investor interest. We intentionally do not make a decision based on what the ETF represents as we believe that market demand and volume are important components to the makeup of the index. If an asset class is gaining in popularity amongst the investing community we want to have exposure to that asset class.

The Astor ETF Port 100 Index is created by imposing weights on the components meeting the above criteria according to their correlation. The index is re-weighted quarterly based on daily correlations over the preceding 100 days. We believe that correlation is an extremely important statistic when creating an investment portfolio. The lower the correlation between two assets the smother the equity curve and lower the risk and drawdown. Each individual security is measured against the equally-weighted index to identify its correlation to the other index components. Assets with higher correlations are given lower weightings and assets with lower correlations are given higher weightings.

A correlation-weighted index of assets that are in demand by investors has proven to create an index with many of the attributes of the S&P 500, having an over 90% correlation to the S&P 500, but with significantly lower standard deviation and lower drawdown. The correlation-weighted Astor ETF Port 100 Index should become a staple in any investment portfolio and can one day replace much of the holding of the S&P.