The Verified Intraday Indicative Value (VIIV)Unlike traditional ETFs, the fund does not tell the public what assets it holds each day. Instead, the fund provides a verified intraday indicative value (VIIV), calculated and disseminated every second throughout the trading day by the fund’s listing exchange or by market data vendors or other information providers. For example, the VIIV can be found on Yahoo Finance (https://finance.yahoo.com) by typing “^CAPE-IV” (Shiller CAPE U.S. Equities ETF) in the search box labeled “Quote Lookup.” The VIIV is based on the current market value of the securities in the fund’s portfolio on that day. The VIIV is intended to provide investors and other market participants with a highly correlated per share value of the underlying portfolio that can be compared to the current market price. The specific methodology for calculating the fund’s VIIV is available below.
Methodology for Calculating the VIIVTo calculate the VIIV, the fund employs two separate calculation engines to provide two independently calculated sources of intraday indicative values (calculation engines). The fund then uses a pricing verification agent to continuously compare the data from both the calculations engines on a real time basis. If during the process of real time price verification, the indicative values from the calculation engines differ by more than 25 basis points for 60 consecutive seconds, the pricing verification agent will alert the advisor, and the advisor will request that the Listing Exchange halt trading of the fund’s shares until the two indicative values come back into line. This “circuit breaker” is designed to prevent the VIIV from reflecting outlier prices.
The VIIV is designed to provide sufficient information to allow for an effective arbitrage mechanism that will keep the market price of the fund’s shares trading at or close to the underlying NAV per share of the fund. Shares traded on an intraday basis on an exchange, however, will not have a fixed relationship to the previous day’s or the current day’s NAV. There is, however, a risk, which may increase during periods of market disruption or volatility, that market prices will vary significantly from the underlying NAV of a fund. Similarly, because the fund’s shares trade with reference to a published VIIV, they may trade at a wider bid/ask spread when compared to shares of ETFs that publish their portfolios on a daily basis, especially during periods of market disruption or volatility, and therefore, may cost investors more to trade. Although the fund seeks to benefit from keeping its portfolio information secret, some market participants may attempt to use information, including the VIIV, to identify the fund’s trading strategy and the securities held by the fund, which if successful, could result in such market participants engaging in certain predatory trading practices that may have the potential to harm the fund and its shareholders.
Because the shares of the fund are traded in the secondary market, a broker may charge a commission to execute a transaction in shares, and an investor also may incur the cost of the spread between the price at which a dealer will buy shares and the somewhat higher price at which a dealer will sell shares.
