Investment Strategy
The Portfolio invests in Vanguard Total International Bond Index Fund, which employs an indexing investment approach designed to track the performance of the Bloomberg Global Aggregate ex-USD Float Adjusted RIC Capped Index (USD Hedged). This Index provides a broad-based measure of the global, investment-grade, fixed-rate debt markets. The Index includes government, government agency, corporate, and securitized non-U.S. investment-grade fixed income investments, all issued in currencies other than the U.S. dollar and with maturities of more than one year. The Index is market value-weighted and capped to comply with investment company diversification standards of the Internal Revenue Code, which state that, at the close of each fiscal quarter, a fund’s (1) exposure to any particular bond issuer may not exceed 25% of the fund’s assets and (2) aggregate exposure to issuers that individually constitute 5% or more of the fund may not exceed 50% of the fund’s assets. To help enforce these limits, if the Index, on the last business day of any month, were to have greater than 20% exposure to any particular bond issuer, or greater than 48% aggregate exposure to issuers that individually constitute 5% or more of the Index, then the index provider would reallocate the excess to bonds of other issuers represented in the Index. The Index methodology is not designed to satisfy the diversification requirements of the Investment Company Act of 1940. The Fund will attempt to hedge its foreign currency exposure, primarily through the use of foreign currency exchange forward contracts, in order to correlate to the returns of the Index, which is U.S. dollar hedged. Such hedging is intended to minimize the currency risk associated with investment in bonds denominated in currencies other than the U.S. dollar.
The Fund invests by sampling the Index, meaning that it holds a range of securities that, in the aggregate, approximates the full Index in terms of key risk factors and other characteristics. All of the Fund’s investments will be selected through the sampling process and, under normal circumstances, at least 80% of the Fund’s assets will be invested in bonds included in the Index. The Fund maintains a dollar-weighted average maturity consistent with that of the Index. As of October 31, 2023, the dollar-weighted average maturity of the Index was 8.7 years.
Investment Risks
The Portfolio is subject to the risk of the underlying fund, which includes country/regional risk, interest rate risk, income risk, nondiversification risk, credit risk, call risk, index sampling risk, currency and currency hedging risk, and derivatives risk. For more information regarding the Portfolio risk factors, please refer to the Explanation of the Risk Factors of the Portfolios and Underlying Funds beginning on page 29 of the Disclosure Statement.
