Q: What is your investment philosophy? A: Our philosophy is to develop outstanding products that provide advisors and retail investors with precise exposure to segments of the market that have previously been inefficient or not readily accessible. We believe that SPDR family of ETFs can be used to gain one of the broadest market exposures with differing levels of correlation. The size of the SPDR family has more than doubled over the last couple of years to include 70 ETFs. Most of our recent focus has been on the international and fixed income markets, which we felt were areas of the ETF industry that didn?t have enough offerings. We have seen considerable success in the international and fixed income space where we have introduced a number of first to market products that reached an untapped need. One example is in international real estate with RWX, the SPDR Dow Jones Wilshire International Real Estate ETF, which rapidly gathered more than $1 billion in assets. An example in fixed income is BWX - the SPDR Lehman International Treasury ETF, which is the first ETF to provide investors with exposure to non-U.S. fixed income markets and their currencies. Launched in October 2007, BWX has already gathered $800 million in assets. It is a portfolio of non-U.S. sovereign debt, or debt issued by the governments of non-U.S. countries. In the portfolio, you get exposure to 18 countries and 15 currencies. It?s broadly diversified - the largest country weighting is Japan at just over 22%, and it has 10% emerging market bond exposure. The SPDR lehman International Treasury ETF provides precise exposure to the bonds of those countries and their currencies. These bonds were issued in the local currency and are not dollar denominated. This is one of the most powerful features of BWX ? you get diversification within the bond portfolio and the currency exposure. These exposures tend to be inversely related to the U.S. currency. Q: Why is the product called SPDR? A: In 2007, we rebranded all of our ETFs under a single umbrella brand- SPDR. Everything we do that?s an exchange traded fund is branded SPDR ? it?s a name investors recognize and trust. Q: How many ETFs are in the family? A: There are currently 70 ETFs in the SPDR family. Most of our focus in the last year-and-a-half has been on international and fixed income ETFs. In our view, the SPDR ETF family is broad enough and there are enough products with enough diversity that you could build a nice portfolio completely out of SPDR ETFs. In the last eighteen months, we have added ETFs for regional and emerging markets like Middle East and Africa, Latin America, and the BRICcountries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). We have added international small cap and global infrastructure ETFs. On the fixed income side, we have added ETFs based on the lehman Aggregate index, short term Treasury bills (BIL), as well as inflation protected government securities for the US and internationally?IPE and WIP, respectively. Q: Is there an area where you have seen a lot of interest recently? A: We introduced a municipal bond ETF in September 2007 ? the SPDR Lehman Municipal bond ETF (TFI). Assets have really begun to move into the asset class in 2008, as investors have recognized that municipal bonds are offering compelling value relative to treasuries from a yield standpoint. High yield bonds are another area offering an interesting opportunity to investors, and we have seen strong interest in JNK, our SPDR Lehman High Yield Bond ETF. Q: Are there areas where you see growth opportunities? A: Fixed income, in general, is underrepresented in the ETF industry. Bond ETF assets are about 7% of the industry and if you look at mutual funds, it?s closer to a third of the industry. So there is a room for the asset base to grow in the fixed income ETFs. There is also tremendous interest in non-U.S. exposure from institutions, advisors and individual investors. We knew that nobody had effectively covered the non-U.S. bond area well enough. When you look at products like the International REITs, being first to market can be a very important advantage in the ETF market. Being able to offer a product that?s truly unique and could become the default brand in that space is significant and we certainly saw that opportunity with international government bonds. Q: Are bond ETFs linked to any index? A: For BWX, the international treasury ETF, we are working with Lehman Brothers. By far, the most significant portion of fixed income ETF assets are based on Lehman Indexes Lehman had an established global treasury ex-US index. For the ETF we needed to use a capped version of this index, as Japan actually represents almost 40% of the non-U.S. Treasury market and we needed to limit the exposure in the fund to 25%. Our goal is to provide diversification benefits through an ETF that is non-correlated, well represented, and based on a broad index. From an ETF provider standpoint, you need to be comfortable that it?s an asset class you can manage and we are fortunate to have extensive management and indexing capabilities both in the U.S. and non-US equity, and the US and non-U.S. fixed income side. Q: So 25% is capped for Japan and what are the other components of that index? A: That would be Germany at almost 13%, Italy at 12%, and then Spain and Belgium providing exposure to the Euro and various government maturities. Q: What would be the third currency exposure besides the Yen and the Euro? A: The third would be the British pound. Q: Could you give us another example of a recently launched product? A: The SPDR lehman Municipal bond ETF is a good example. In working with Lehman, we identified the Lehman Brothers Municipal Managed Money Index, which is a broadly diversified index that?s already been screened to eliminate some of the less liquid or more idiosyncratic parts of the muni bond market including Alternative Minimum Tax bonds, hospital bonds, airport bonds, and housing bonds. The index is of very high quality, AA or higher, which provides access to the most liquid parts of the municipal bond market. In fact, the Lehman Brothers Municipal Managed Money Index offers higher liquidity and higher quality than the overall municipal bond market. In our view, that made it a better match for an ETF structure. TFI is the ticker for the SPDR Lehman Municipal Bond ETF. The ETF has seen strong inflow of funds so far in 2008. Q: How old is the product now? A: The fund was launched in September of 2007 and currently has $250 million dollars in assets. Of these assets about $190 million were gathered this year. Q: When was the SPDR Gold Shares (GlD) product launched and what has been the progress in asset gathering since then? A: SPDR gold Shares (GlD), the first US commodity based exchange traded security, was launched on November 18, 2004, and quickly emerged as one of the fastest growing exchange traded products. having reached a high of approximately $21 billion in March of 2008, GlD currently has approximately $17.1 billion in assets in the Trust as of May 28, 2008.