The Fund pursues its investment objective by investing primarily in the stocks of companies with the 25 to 50 most attractive and leading brands, from a fundamental and technical perspective, contained in the Alpha Brands Consumer Spending Index (the “Index”). The Index tracks the performance of 200 highly recognizable and relevant U.S. and foreign brands with a business to consumer and business to business focus. Companies with a business to consumer focus primarily operate to create and sell products and/or services to the consumer on a direct basis or through intermediaries. Companies with a business to business focus generally create and sell products and/or services to other businesses, which are typically used to aid these businesses in serving their clients. The Fund’s strategy is based on the premise that consumption drives the U.S. economy with roughly 70% of U.S. GDP derived from household consumption, and that brand loyalty, demographics, and incomes typically drive consumption habits.

Brands are assets owned by a corporation that often represent products and services to an end user. Companies sell products and services under a unique product name or “brand” that has built an emotional connection with customers over time and with large amounts of advertising dollars. The leading brands have embedded themselves in our daily lives and often inspire trust, loyalty and respect.

The Index measures the performance of 180 U.S. listed companies and 20 non-U.S. listed companies selected from 70 sub-industries that are deemed by the index provider’s rules-based methodology to have a large number of companies focused directly or indirectly on the consumer and consumer/business products and services. The Index methodology is designed to track the leading companies by isolating those companies with the highest market cap, three-year total sales and three-year sales growth. By virtue of being at the top of these rankings, a company is deemed a “leading” company in its consumer-focused industry or its business to business focused industry. A company is excluded from the index if (i) it does not rank high enough to be eligible for inclusion based on the methodology described above at the time of initial calculation or in subsequent years’ reconstitutions; or (ii) it is acquired by another company where such acquired company’s shares cease trading on an exchange. The Index is equally weighted and is rebalanced and reconstituted annually in December. The Fund’s investment sub-advisor, Accuvest Global Advisors (the “Sub-Advisor”), is also the sponsor of the Index.

From the universe of securities in the Index, the Sub-Advisor selects the Fund’s portfolio based on its multi-step proprietary investment process. The Sub-Advisor uses fundamental and technical analysis to identify companies to include in the Fund’s portfolio. Fundamental analysis includes analyzing a company’s cash flow, sales, earnings per share, intangible assets, and similar statistics to identify companies that the Sub-Advisor believes have a competitive advantage over other companies. Technical analysis includes analyzing a company’s price movements over various time frames to identify the most attractive buy and sell levels, which helps identify the best time to buy or sell a particular security. The Fund may invest, directly or indirectly through investments in ETFs, in both U.S. and foreign companies included in the Index, including through American Depositary Receipts (“ADRs”), and companies domiciled in emerging markets. Although the Fund may invest in companies of any market capitalization, it expects the market capitalization of the companies held in its portfolio to be $2 billion and above at the time of purchase. From time to time, the Fund may also invest in ETFs to gain exposure to particular consumer-focused and business to business focused industries. In times of economic turmoil or unusually high equity valuations where equity risk is deemed high, or other unfavorable conditions, the Fund may invest in cash and cash equivalents, inverse equity ETFs and in asset classes that have historically been safe havens when equities were experiencing drawdowns, which are U.S. treasury securities, short-term bonds, and the U.S. dollar. The Fund may invest across sectors, and at times might have individual positions that in the aggregate result in significant exposures to specific sectors, such as the consumer discretionary, consumer staples and financials sectors.

The process begins with the identification of the primary characteristics currently driving returns of S&P 500 companies. Examples of such characteristics include growth, value, size, momentum, strong balance sheet (i.e., high assets over liabilities, high total assets over total debt, high cash on balance sheet, low debt to equity ratio), profitability and dividend yield (a financial ratio that indicates how much a company pays out in dividends each year relative to its share price). Multiple baskets of companies included in the Index are then created based on these characteristics. Along with company fundamentals, the Sub-Advisor takes into account interest rate movements and U.S. dollar movements when analyzing stock and sector allocations. The investment process identifies important growth themes, employs single and multi-factor screens to identify those companies with the strongest fundamentals, and analyzes various technical and risk factors to select the companies with the most attractive current price. The Sub-Advisor, based on its fundamental and technical analysis, determines the appropriate weighting of the companies within the Fund’s portfolio. Allocations of the portfolio’s equity assets to cash, cash equivalents, inverse equity ETFs and in asset classes that have historically been safe havens when equities were experiencing drawdowns, which are U.S. treasury securities, short-term bonds, and the U.S. dollar are based on the Sub-Advisor’s proprietary risk dashboard, which monitors current equity market technical indicators (important moving averages and crosses of those averages), macroeconomic fundamental indicators (valuations, GDP growth, inflation trends), as well as interest rate and U.S. dollar movements. The Fund’s allocation of its assets to cash, cash equivalents, and protective ETFs may be significantly skewed towards cash and/or protective assets at times of high market stress.

The companies held by the Fund are sold when there is a change in fundamentals, the target price of the company is met, and/or the Sub-Advisor has identified better investment opportunities.