VAN is an investment advisor registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and a Commodity Trading Advisor registered with the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and the National Futures Association. The company helps qualified investors locate superior hedge funds that meet investors' specifications for historical risk-adjusted returns, construct customized hedge fund portfolios, and benchmark their portfolios.

The Van Hedge Fund Index, produced monthly, originally represented the industry's first benchmarking information based on a very large and representative sample. The Index shows returns monthly, by sector and style, for U.S. hedge funds and Offshore funds separately, and also combined as a Global Index. The Company's database, which is used in construction of the Index, contains detailed information on over 3,400 hedge funds (2,000 U.S. and 1,400 offshore). These funds represent about $182 billion of assets.

The Indexes are updated monthly based on returns received from contributing hedge funds. In addition to tracking net quarterly and/or net monthly returns over as many as 11 years on each fund, the database contains, for each fund, dozens of performance and non-performance variables which are intended to be useful to hedge fund investors. They include such characteristics as aggregate assets under management, extent of leverage, use of derivatives, and many others. We are therefore able to perform multi-variable analysis and sorts.

The database is believed to be reasonably representative of the hedge fund universe; it is based on a large sample and is one of the few databases anywhere that does not exclude hedge funds for performance (or other) reasons.