1) Source: Bloomberg and NCREIF. The average annual total return before fees for the Standard & Poor's 500 index, Merrill Lynch U.S. Treasury 10-Year bond index, Merrill Lynch 3-month U.S. T-bills (for "cash") and NCREIF Property Index for the ten years ended December 31, 2007 were 10.2%, 7.3%, 4.6% and 15.2%, respectively. "Risk" equals the standard deviation of returns, a statistical measure of volatility, which quantifies how widely a series of values are dispersed from the average value (the mean). A higher standard deviation indicates greater volatility - a higher variation from the average return over the applicable time period. The standard deviation of the total returns for the ten years ended December 31, 2007 on the NCREIF Property Index was 2.3% compared to 7.5% for the Merrill Lynch U.S. Treasury 10-year bond index, 16.8% for the Standard & Poor's 500 and 0.9% for Merrill Lynch 3-month U.S. T-bills (for "cash"). |
