Northern Trust is proud to provide the industry's first ever peer group comparison universe for total portfolio risk. Consisting of asset-class level and plan level risk calculations on a large sample size of U.S. institutional investment programs, this universe provides an excellent backdrop for evaluating the current risk level of your program relative to your peers. Using Value at Risk (VaR) as a risk measure, this tool essentially creates a universe of VaR numbers for a broad cross section of investment programs. Essentially VaR poses the question: How much could we potentially lose over a given period of time with a certain probability? This information is available free of charge.

Features/Characteristics:

• Compare risk of your plan to large universe
• Creation of an Industry Standard risk benchmark
• Web-driven
• Composition of the Universe

The inclusion set in the Northern Trust Risk Universe is all corporate and public fund clients who participate in the Northern Trust Performance Universe. As of March 31, 2009 this set consists of 151 separate plans.

Features and characteristics of the included plans:

• Broad cross-section of institutional pension funds
• 108 corporate pension plans
• 43 public pension plans
• Average market value of $3.2 billion

As of 1st Quarter 2004, the model to calculate Value at Risk was enhanced to increase the responsiveness to significant changes in the volatility of the market place. The enhanced model reacts faster to changes for both increases and decreases in market volatility.