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 constituent securities of the Index and investments that have economic characteristics that are substantially identical to the economic characteristics of such constituent securities.

WisdomTree, Inc., the Index Provider and parent company of the Fund’s investment adviser, WisdomTree Asset Management, Inc. (“WisdomTree Asset Management” or the “Adviser”), designed the Index 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 indexes.

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 S&P Global Ratings. 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.

The Index weights the short exposure to U.S. Treasuries of differing maturities in an attempt to offset the sensitivity of the long exposure to overall moves in interest rates across the yield curve. The Long Basket and Short Basket of the Index are rebalanced on a monthly basis.

The Index is designed to have greater returns than an equivalent non-interest rate hedged investment when U.S. Treasury rates are rising significantly. Conversely, the Index is designed to have lower returns than an equivalent non-interest rate hedged investment when U.S. Treasury rates are falling significantly.

To the extent the Index concentrates (i.e., holds more than 25% of its total assets) in the securities of a particular industry or group of industries, the Fund will concentrate its investments to approximately the same extent as its Index.