Principal Investment Strategies
The Fund employs an indexing investment
approach designed to track the performance of the Nasdaq US Dividend Achievers Select Index, which consists of common stocks of companies that have a record of increasing dividends over time. The Fund attempts to
replicate the target index by investing all, or substantially all, of its assets in the stocks that make up the Index, holding each stock in approximately the same proportion as its weighting in the Index.
Principal Risks
An investment in the Fund could lose money over
short or long periods of time. You should expect the Fund's share price and total return to fluctuate within a wide range. The Fund is subject to the following risks, which could affect the Fund's performance:
• Stock market risk, which is the chance that stock prices overall will decline. Stock markets tend to move in cycles, with periods of rising prices and periods of falling prices. The
Fund’s target index tracks a subset of the U.S. stock market, which could cause the Fund to perform differently from the overall stock market. In addition, the Fund’s target index may, at times, become
focused in stocks of a particular market sector, which would subject the Fund to proportionately higher exposure to the risks of that sector.
• Investment style risk, which is the chance that returns from dividend-paying stocks will trail returns from the overall stock market. In addition, mid-capitalization stocks (to the
extent that the Fund’s assets are invested in mid-cap stocks) historically have been more volatile in price than the large-cap stocks that dominate the overall stock market. Dividend-paying stocks tend to go
through cycles of doing better—or worse— than the stock market in general. These periods have, in the past, lasted for as long as several years.
Because ETF Shares are traded on
an exchange, they are subject to additional risks:
• The Fund’s
ETF Shares are listed for trading on NYSE Arca and are bought and sold on the secondary market at market prices. Although it is expected that the market price of an ETF Share typically will approximate its net asset
value (NAV), there may be times when the market price and the NAV differ significantly. Thus, you may pay more or less than NAV when you buy ETF Shares on the secondary market, and you may receive more or less than
NAV when you sell those shares.
• Although the
Fund’s ETF Shares are listed for trading on NYSE Arca, it is possible that an active trading market may not be maintained.
• Trading of the
Fund’s ETF Shares may be halted by the activation of individual or marketwide trading halts (which halt trading for a specific period of time when the price of a particular security or overall market prices
decline by a specified