Episode 109: Behind the headlines: a deep dive into the latest stories

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Kevin Headland

Commentaries for general information purposes only. Clients should seek professional advice for their particular situation.

Kevin Headland

When it first came out. I love to watch the TV show Law and Order. I really enjoyed the structure of the show and that the episodes were, quote unquote, ripped from the headlines. Now they aren't based on actual facts, but more so inspired by recent news or headlines. On this episode of Investments Unplugged, we're taking inspiration from Law and Order, and we'll talk about recent headlines and news that are coming up in conversations with financial advisors or that we just found interesting. Listen on this is Investors Unplugged.

Kevin Headland

Welcome back to Investments Unplugged. I'm your co-host, Kevin Headland, Chief Investment strategist of Manulife Investment Management. And with me is, the Batman to my Robin or the Robin to my Batman. I like to say, I almost had a Freudian slip there. Macan Nia the Co-chief Investment strategist. How's it going, Macan?

Macan Nia

I take offense to your Batman and Robin. Robin is junior to Batman, and that implies that I'm a junior to you. Well, first you try to call yourself Chief investment strategist and not the co-chief. You're just sending me messages.

Kevin Headland

I would never do that. I need you. We need each other. Yeah. This episode's we gotta, you know, give it summertime. We're going to. I always say a little calmer, but, given the, the news flow, the headlines and what's going on, it's never kind of quiet, that's for sure.

But because everything is going on, I think what we want to do is, as I mentioned, my intro kind of, you know, talk about things ripped from the headlines.

Right. Let's talk about some of the the current headlines that are on top of minds. The questions we're getting from advisors right now,

and really trying to answer or help you answer some of those questions, for clients. So, mocha, I think you had the first headline you want to talk about. Yeah. So a topical conversation in this year has been the weakness of the US dollar, which has actually been the exact opposite theme that we saw in US dollar in 2024.

And good reason for it. The US dollar just tallied its worst half of a calendar year since the early 70s. The US dollar, measured by the.

There's many ways of looking at it, but we're looking at it from the ice. US Dollar index has fallen nearly 11% in the first six months of the year. And as I mentioned, this is the weakest first half of the year since actually going back to 1973, which was the actually the year that Bretton Woods system was finally collapsed, allowing currencies to trade freely on the global market.

Now, there's many reasons for the weakness in the US dollar. We're going to highlight three one being foreign hedging. So often investors, you know, who report their return in one currency but invest in another. They'll hedge that currency risk have. But over the years, given the strength in the US stock market and dollar investors were doing that.

However, recently we've seen a strength in international stocks or more investors are investing internationally, but we've also seen a weakness in the US dollar. So we have seen hedging. And you know, when you take the short of the US dollar, you got to take the opposite end of it from a derivative perspective. So that's been one reason. Number two is fed rate cuts loom likely.

Right. So many economists and investors we're kind of waiting for tariff policy to impact inflation to the upside. We haven't seen that materialize yet. And now when you look at interest rate expectation cuts you're seeing actually Canada US is a good example. One cut is expected for the Bank of Canada. Two is expected for the Federal Reserve. There's more pressure on the fed to cut from the Trump administration.

So that's the reason. Number two is the fed may be more likely to be cutting moving forward than other central banks. And then last but not least, and this is hard to quantify, Kev, is this defacto weak dollar policy by the Trump administration, who have come out and actually had not said anything about it. But you know what's interesting to me, researching this is senior government officials from Japan, South Korea, have talked about when they talk to the Trump administration, that that seems to be a policy they want to, you know, initiate.

And reason for that is weaker us dollar can be beneficial to US exporters, manufacturers. So when you look at these three factors, whether it's foreign hedging, fed rate cuts and then also this de facto weak dollar policy that has led to the weak US dollar. And honestly Kev, I don't see any one of these really switching. So path of least resistance is what we always talk about.

It's likely going to be downwards, but in our view, not to the magnitude that we have seen in the first half of the year. Yeah. The DXY index you mentioned this is around 97 right now.

You know, it's also coming off of extreme highs, as you said last year because of the performance of U.S equity stocks, the US dollar was the best game in town.

People were buying US dollars to buy US securities as foreigners invested in the US stock market. And I almost want to say this is the current drop is almost like a normalization almost. It's not like panic mode.

It's been a it was a while a while for the US dollar. It actually breached that 100 level on the DXY.

And now people were just almost like going away from the US dollar. The big dollarization. And we talked about there are a lot of imported podcasts and all these other factors that say, okay, this starts going away. Perhaps maybe there's again, this is more normalization.

There's other currencies available. The euro has done very well as more fiscal spending is there like the safety has been.

Yeah. During the, uncertainty around tariffs has been not U.S. dollar because they're the creator of the uncertainty. It's been more to things like the Swiss franc in the euro, Japanese yen, German boons. Yeah. It's interesting that the Swiss,

sort of bank was actually looking at cutting their rates to or sort of, to protect their currency from rallying too strongly because they're worried because there was so much demand for the Swiss franc, so kind of thing there.

But as you said, I think path to least resistance is like a downside, but not materially. Nothing to worry about, I don't think. No panic ensued.

Perhaps, you know, a little bit weakness from the US down here, which means perhaps more strength actually in dollars. Well, but again, not materially. You know, we're not saying is going to be $0.80 here, but maybe it stops around 73, $0.74 and stays around this choppiness for a little while.

And it's funny, as you, you know, speaking of, of, currency and then perhaps the uncertainty, a lot of uncertainty, the headlines of the one big beautiful bill.

There's a lot of talk about that, a lot of different iterations. The final bill was finally passed and signed by President Trump on July 4th. Kind of, celebratory, event as well, since it was Independence Day.

And this final bill is over a thousand pages, I think it came up to 1078 pages.

I don't know how the legislators pored over all those pages to, you know, find the minutia and whatnot.

Interesting enough from academia, they probably didn't have well, they had backbenchers and, you know, associates and whatnot to, to pour over that, all those pages.

Right. Give them summary notes, maybe, maybe some, some, it's exactly, you know,

but one thing that was actually kind of talked about in Canada, and we've been talking about hearing a lot of it is, section 899, which was a retaliatory tariff or counter attacks, for those countries, that would perhaps those investors would be paying a higher tax if those countries had,

some kind of taxation or, anti-US legislation, like the digital tax, that was that essentially repealed in Canada.

But interesting enough, again, in my research on this, section eight, nine nine was not included in the final bill. So all this talk, all this uncertainty, all this worry was actually for not it was kind of like, okay, it actually wasn't as bad as it is.

But one thing we are going to see is the risk of increase of deficit in the US.

The expectation is, the calculation right now by the Congressional Budget Office is that an increase the deficit, roughly by 3 trillion or so.

Over the next ten years. Those numbers seem incredibly high.

The current deficit, per year, is actually running or only around, 1.8 trillion, so kind of low double or so in the next ten years.

But also the debt level is still over the, you know, 30 trillion.

So yes, it seems like big numbers, but that's over the next ten years, it's not, perhaps as big a worrisome as people might think.

Might be some more issuance in treasuries.

There's some uncertainty about how much debt, of course.

But again, I don't think it's going to absolutely, collapse the US Treasury market or anything or because there's gonna be massive issuance to pay for this, this one big, beautiful bill.

No, but if you are, fiscal hawk or a fiscal conservative, this goes actually against what you're expecting from the Trump administration. And I think to this point, in terms of the deficits increasing, pieces that investors did not think we're going to happen a little less than three months ago has had a impact on the US dollar.

So when you have deficits of these levels, there's three ways to kind of escape them. Number one is cutting spending that may happen with Social Security and Medicaid at some point. Other way is to increase taxes, which I think is much less likely than the spending. And then the last but not least is devalue your currency. And some investors believe that that is the maybe strategy of the Trump administration.

And that may have led to the decline in the US dollar. But when you look at the big beautiful bill, I think it's due to your point. Have we were fielding lots of questions in terms of the taxation implications, but surprised of surprise, they took part out of it. That would, would have impacted foreign capital into the US.

And that's very important obviously for further capital account. So lot of talk, but we'll see how this unfolds moving forward. Know one interesting aspect of that. You said the foreign investment. Well, that would actually hurt the stock market. So you don't want to take away of course investors, especially given the returns so far this year that's just favored non-U.S. investment.

The other thing you're talking about is for fiscal hawks. This will be really interesting for,

2026 midterm elections. You know, this will be quite, perhaps a contentious, piece of legislation for the, that'll come up in the midterm elections, which will be, of course, quite interesting, as it could be reshuffling in the, the House and Senate.

I'm going to put my money on that. The fiscal hawks will be happy with the tax cuts. And, you know, look away from the deficit increases. There'll be angles that whichever angle favors them, that'll be the the piece to focus on, right. That everyone looks forward to, which part of the legislation actually is beneficial to them or could hurt their competitor to make them win.

Right. It'll be either, of course, for sure, because when you talk about, you know, one of the things we're dealing with is fundamentals right now and soft data, hard data. And some of the issues post Covid, and even during Covid, I remember that you remember during Covid, we're trying to get data and we went to this stuff like going to look at, Google Trends and, how much, foot traffic was at the airports and stuff like that.

And this was kind of the year that was things we studied in school like, those are those doesn't exist in textbooks. And we have to adjust that. And now post-Covid, we're still dealing with some issues in terms of getting the data and understanding the data that we're receiving. Yeah, I think, you know, exactly during Covid, the typical data sets that we relied on were becoming tougher to follow for all sorts of reason.

Now, in 2025, the challenge is twofold. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So I'm just going to call it the BLS. It collects data on costs for a market basket of goods and services that we consume. Rachel. Things like medical tests rent movie tickets. And they they collected across 75 urban areas in the United States. And that data that they collect feeds into CPI, which the fed uses for their monetary policy.

The challenge is in June. The BLS announced that actually is going to stop serving living expenses in some cities due to a lack of resources. And it's twofold. And number one is the challenge is, is because the survey base, they're finding that public participation has become less and just story out of numbers. A from 2000 to 2020 over let's say two decades.

The basically survey participation fell from 93% to 83%. And since the pandemic. And it's come down to I'm going to round it up 70% so less people are being involved in it. And on the flip side, because of Doge, because of hiring freezes from the Trump administration, some of these agencies are at 60% capacity, so they have fewer personnel in the field.

So not only are people less likely to get data for it, but it's also harder to get the data. And that just makes our job tougher. And even more so, the fed or other, government agencies that rely on this data to make fiscal decisions polit monetary decisions and just makes it tougher. So all this means is we have to rely on different data sets.

Now to make decisions moving forward. Thankfully, there is a whole host of data sets out there, but another challenge is that the data available is becoming murkier. And murkier is a great word, and I think the one thing you're also seeing is is larger visions. So you get preliminary data and then final data comes out game revisions or following month big revisions.

There is a lot of talk about delays, especially from small businesses. So you're getting, you know, cutting employment data, for example, from, you know, the entire subset of companies in the U.S. and you get large companies, medium size coming in small business companies, the small companies are actually delaying their feeding of the data, which could again alter the actual non-farm payrolls and the employment data.

And you think it's worse than it really is, but actually isn't because small businesses were hiring or not.

They tend to be the largest hires because they're the largest, cohort of companies in the US.

So a lot of just challenges with data sets. And, we also talked about the hard data, soft data, as I mentioned, where you're getting, you know, hard data, saying one thing like economic growth and CPI inflation, but the software, the service data saying something else and it's it's quite interesting.

I think this is why over the last couple of years you remember a lot of individuals, a lot of strategy out there, us included, were talking about the elevated risk of recession. The US, of course, that didn't happen because a lot of data was suggesting that. But maybe there was flaws, that data, maybe we weren't seeing certain things, which quite interesting.

Yeah. And that's a good point. I think that's an interesting point investors and economists are dealing with. Is this hard data or soft data? Hard data is facts. Job numbers are this in soft data is feelings. And even within the soft data you're seeing discrepancies based on. In the US. It's interesting the soft data depending on your political leaning.

So if I ask you in terms of the soft data, which individuals if which party are they more optimistic about the future? It's obviously the Republicans. So you see it in the data set, the soft data there. Republicans are optimistic about the future. And Democrats who are surveyed are not. And that adds a whole host of other challenges to it.

So long story short, the data is becoming murkier. We're relying on different data sets, but we're also relying on company earnings and management comments as well, because those are much too I feel like those are much more facts oriented than feeling oriented. It's funny you mentioned that feelings, but within feelings also, it's your emotions. And how do you feel?

You have very strong emotions perhaps about, the political environment. And that really impacts your surveys. If you if imagine you had a, interaction with a company and you always get those surveys afterwards. Right. Like how do you feel if it was a poor interaction, you might have had great interaction before, but you have recency bias.

And that most recency like impact or experience is going to impact your, your survey. And that's

going to be quite interesting. Now we're talking about data. Once they of course, you talk about the, you know, the stocks and movements and, and kind of the sense of hard data and where things are going and seems like the economy's doing well.

Fundamentals seem to be doing well. Earnings growth in the US are doing well less than perhaps expected you know in kind of revisions lower. Yet the stock market just keeps marching higher. We had a kind of a stumble in the first quarter. We had, you know bear market territory -20% levels on the Nasdaq.

Almost that level, the Sp500. And it's like by saying in the same quarter, first quarter doesn't exist anymore. Everything's great. It's phenomenal record highs again. And we had a company recently. We're recording this on July 10th. A company record surpassed the $4 trillion level in Nvidia. There's a lot of guesses about which one is going to finally surpass Nvidia.

Surpass 4 trillion was gonna be Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, which are the mag seven Nvidia hit it

short lived. It is now at current recording below 4 trillion, but just a notch. Not very much. And it surpassed 3 trillion only almost two years ago to the day. So it's really extra trillion,

in those two years now, it wasn't too long ago we had our first trillion dollar company in the US. Remember when that was?

My heart, says Apple.

Yes. My brain. Oh, is it? My brain is gonna say Google, but maybe I should follow my heart to heart. It sounds like a great follow your heart. There you go. Yeah. It was, it was Apple.

But wasn't the all the first 1 trillion company globally interesting enough? Do you know what the first $1 trillion company globally was?

He gave me the sector energy. Oh, it's an energy. It's, what's the one? And, because they've had so many shell Dutch shell. So like, no, no. Oh it's oh no no no no no no Saudi Aramco. Nope Petro China.

Oh wow Petro actually hit in 2007 on its IPO with Saudi Aramco is actually private. So that is easy go there.

Yeah it is private. Doesn't make sense. Yeah. When was that Kev 2007 on its IPO. Oh wow. But is it now it's like it was depending on the R eight share I think the eight share was

I looked it up recently.

The eight share is actually now at 1.7 billion.

No, that doesn't make sense. It went from 1 trillion to 1.7 billion.

It collapsed right now of course that's eight share. There's also a shares which is the on sure.

Stock market. So maybe combined a little bit higher. But it class materially because

it plummeted actually just afterwards to 260 billion by the end of 2008 because the collapse in oil prices.

So it was a big jump, an IPO crash afterwards.

That was the first trillion our company. Then, of course, we had Apple, Microsoft, and then now,

in Virginia crossing, 4 trillion we'll see which ones next one or it's if, if they can maintain the 4 trillion plus.

But it's amazing how big this companies are getting in such a short amount of time.

It's just phenomenal.

And again, it shows you, the market just has a willingness to keep buying certain securities. And this is a lot of talk about, you know, tech bubbles as of where we are on a call this morning and with our, our global, strategists and portfolio managers and, some, you know, we're talking about bubble saying this is not 1999.

The fundamentals of these, even these tech like companies are much different than 99.

But but it's still quite interesting how, you know, things move higher very quickly. And then Nvidia hitting that 4 trillion market cap, it's just highlights the power of AI. So you said a couple years ago history. Now two years later it's got another trillion in in market cap and just shows you the power of AI.

It's the future. And regardless of which way AI goes, Nvidia is likely going to be a beneficiary of it.

Because you need the chips right now. We'll see what the Chinese do with their semiconductors, but they're very they're behind, the Americans, but they're closing the gap. So it'll be very interesting to see

if we do this podcast in two years, whether Ada is a $4 trillion market cap company, and if there is, which one it is it, and at what price can be 5 trillion.

It's a I think we're talking about this on how years ago we were talking about who's going to be, you know, the 2 trillion our company who's the next. And I think we were even talking about we probably

don't even know that company. Right. And that's the key is like they could be coming from out of nowhere. You know, it's a from a chip perspective.

Think it's almost like a, you know, the new global arms race. You know, there's every company they're trying to find the best better chip out there. Now, of course, what we do is, is all about math.

You know, that's one thing I love about this.

I've always enjoyed math as a student.

But once you come across, you have two young daughters.

I just think of the young. They're not even, you know, they're not as young as they used to be. I feel like things are passing by so fast. Seriously, you came across a really interesting article, I think. And this is, this is really important, I think, for, for parents, of, both boys and girls, in terms of school and mathematics.

Yeah. This is a weird one for me, Kev, because for me, like, Iranian background,

focus on math, regardless of gender. So all the girls around me were always very strong in math and science. And when I would hear these, like when I hear these generalizations that girls aren't good in math, I was surprised by that. But so basically, the there's been tons of studies on this, and there's a really good economist article on this.

And now when they look at the data, they see that girls outperform boys in many subjects. I am not surprised by this. They leave school with better grades. They're more likely to get a university degree. But there's still that one problem generally across the spectrum is they lack lag in mathematics. And there's challenges with that, right? It pushes girls away from certain careers.

Jake Downs potential future earnings. And there's a new study that came out of freeze that shows how early the problem starts. And it's not a generalization of it. These are facts actually. And so basically it is if you want to go into the details, it's published in nature. It's a scientific journal. It's in the June 11th edition. And it tracks 2.6 million children who took this.

Basically, the standardized tests have half a year of battery tests, and the data confirms that generally girls are weaker in math and it starts early. But when they started doing the testing, girls and boys are at the same level. But as they progressed, they found that boys were stronger, girls weren't. And it comes down to two reasons they came up with the conclusion.

Number one is anxiety. So the tests show generally there's tons of tests out there that math is usually taught and tested competitively. Rate it's under pressure, in it's conditions that generally women and girls, they don't perform as well in a stress induced time environment. And they found when they took those stress or time environment factors out of it, they they had the same scores.

So that's one aspect of it. And it's funny, I was with my daughter yesterday. We're talking about skiing long story short. And she wants to go into ski racing. And one thing she's like, I don't know if I want to. I'm like, why? She's like, it seems like it's going to be pressure induced. Like I'm going to feel anxious and like you are.

And that's good. It's good to be in those situations. And I just told this just to practice. Right. Like you get better in practice, you're more likely to not be as anxious. So that's one reason for it. The second one's interesting to me is the stereo types that generally, and I actually feel this in my family, kind of is a stereotype that boys are naturally better than girls in math, and it's set at home.

It's like the mother I know. My wife will say I'm bad in math, my wife too. So when my daughters hear that, they may think that, okay, well, women maybe are bad in math, but that's not the case. So my daughters know that I could read math, math, math, math every day and are very strong in it because of practicing.

And they're very confident, which as a finance nerd, I love it. Nothing gets me more joy is I got the report card. Thankfully, they both got, well, Roy as in,

JC so they don't really do math, but I just did really well math. But again, it comes down to, you know, the confidence, the background. It it's not that men are better in math than girls.

That's not the case at all. It's just these other factors that thankfully, we can control as parents to set up our daughters as well, to be as good, if not better than the boys. It's so interesting because I, you know, you have two girls. I have one boy gone girl. My boy is kind of like me, almost naturally just strong math wants doing in his head and wants to rush through it.

My daughter, who is more structural and structured and organized,

I would say is better in math because she has a structure and she's going through it and she and I do or, you know, help her with math homework and stuff. And she loves it. And she, she asked me to do extra problems with her to, you know, because she's enjoying she get it right and she's, she's happy and proud even from an early age.

We used to do, in the car, you know, we like, throw math problems or throwing my friends, my son, because he's older and it was a higher levels math. And my daughter was in grade one, grade two. I'm like, okay, let's start with, you know, additions range in certain things in game to get, again, confident, getting the right answers and and just problem solving.

I think it's such a huge issue starting early. It it just comes cap to me comes down to a base rate. And I think in maths and sciences the stronger base you have. So the stronger economy or confident you are at a young age, it just builds on top of it and I think that's very important moving forward.

So I thought that was a really interesting, article. And something I learned I learned a couple of things from it as well. Yeah. I think it's great you said that in terms of careers as well, you know, and of course, going up when I was in school, in university, in my finance course, in accounting courses, there were not many women at all, you know, and of course, that accounting for BA finance for sure.

And it happens be engineering. Yeah. When you're like yeah for engineers for you. You know when we're looking and you're looking out for individual employees, the base of the university education and those courses and in high school. And so that the love of that math is not there. So you continue on your education. And that, of course, has a big factor five, ten, 20 years down the road.

So, let's end with a fun fact. You know, fun one, that, you know, I'm not a huge baseball fan, but there's not much else going on the summertime. So I tend to watch it, you know, go to the games with my, my friends and stuff that that the Jays that she's a record 54 wins by the all star game like never in their history have they had better a better first half the season.

And we talked about how strong the first half of the year was for the Acme markets. The Jays doing the same thing. So it's it's unreal. Yeah, I'm I'm a massive Jay fan watch every game. And I thought they're going to be better than what people were expecting. But I was not expecting that. As we go into the All-Star break, we'll see what happens with this last series that they're first in the Al.

They swept the Yankees at home and I'm dry. Correlations with like which comeback is better or easier to predict. The markets from the low that we saw in April. And you've seen them rip to all time highs. Or is it the Jays that even less than a month ago they were I think they were three and a half to five games back in a span of a month.

They've come back to be the, the leaders in the Al East. I think the stock market one was easier to call, to be honest.

You know, when you hit the VIX above 30, when in these bear markets that aren't really in recessions, you know, it's easy to predict those. This was harder to predict. It's so Harvey's it's funny how both are very momentum driven.

You get on a heater and baseball and you know you the hitter feels like the ball is like size of a beach ball. It's easy to hit. The markets tend to move momentum's.

Okay. Here's one the rest of the year.

What's easy to predict that continue positive trend in the SB 500 or the Jays maintaining their solid first half of the season.

And do we think they get first in the alleys. Is that is that a is that a pipe dream? I think and this is just my opinion that I think that it's the S&P won't baseline likely they'll go on the tear. But the positive trend there will be a bit of volatility on the way. Of course I think that's easier to, predict.

Baseball for those that follow it is a very, very, very fickle sport. A it's this is the same Jays team basically from last year. And look at the difference the Avenue batting coach. Sure. But come on. And also I was we were talking about earlier we have the Minnesota Twins also had a ten plus game winning streak earlier in the year.

And now they're sub 500. So maybe this is us just as Toronto sports fans. We're just you know we're we've just been created we're insecure. We're a whole host of things. We don't think we deserve nice things when it comes to sports. And maybe that's an aspect of it. But I think the S&P is going to be harder, easier to predict.

But I hope I'm wrong with the Jays. I think Alex will be tough, but I think

card is very, very possible and likely. I think four teams yalies are all above 500, which is yeah, crazy,

to be getting you know, they're probably the hardest division and always are.

So SB 500 more consistent, shall we say, for the end of their season than the Jays for the end of their season?

Well, the S&P 500, when you look at long term trends, as we all know, it's positive depending on the time frame, between 80 to 95% of the time the Jays have been won. The Al East since I think 93. So yeah, it's yeah, as happy as much work. It's just that that the Jays that maybe it's their do it's their version of I mean it's it's their time for a long time something to watch for the for the end of the year.

Some of the interesting to watch for the end of the summer and into the fall.

This is not a fun episode, Macan, as always, is a good time.

I appreciate everyone for joining us.

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But, as always, is a great time.

And I appreciate your list. You listening and enjoying it with us.

So, for Mark on, I'm Kevin. Thanks for joining. And we'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

Take care. Cheers.

This podcast is provided as a general source of information and should not be considered personal legal accounting, tax or investment advice orchestrated as an endorsement or recommendation of any entity or security discussed. Investors should seek the advice of professionals prior to implementing any changes to their investment. Certain statements in this podcast are forward looking that are predictive in nature depend upon or refer to future events or conditions.

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Forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth. Although the forward looking statements contained herein are based upon what MIM and the portfolio manager believe to be reasonable assumptions, neither MIM nor the portfolio manager can assure that actual results will be consistent with these forward looking statements.

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Certain statements contained in this podcast are based in whole or in part on information provided by third parties, and MIM has taken reasonable steps to ensure the accuracy. Market conditions may change, which mean pack the information contained in this podcast. Commissions, trading commissions, major fees and expenses. All may be associated with mutual fund investments. Please read the prospectus before investing.

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The indicated rates of return are the historical annual compounded total returns. Net of fees and expenses payable by the fund, including changes in security, value and reinvestment of all dividends or distributions, and do not take into account sales, redemption, distribution or optional charges or income taxes payable by any security older that would have reduced returns. Mutual funds are not guaranteed.

Their values change frequently, and past performance may not be repeated