BLACKROCK CASH A

Investment Process

The investment decisions are based on careful analysis of credit, interest rate trends and relative value opportunities. The investment strategy builds on macroeconomic themes such as central bank policies, market behaviour and inflation and then applies these to available short term money market instruments. Blackrock's credit team is made up of 45 analysts who focus is on fundamental analysis of the underlying issuer’s credit worthiness and valuations of a variety of companies within different sector/countries. A list of approved securities is then compiled by Blackrock's Cash and Securities Lending credit committee from which the fund manager, Stuart Niman, and his team can construct the fund. It invests in certificates of deposits, floating rate notes, time deposits and commercial paper. The fund is constrained to investing at least half of the portfolio in the highest credit rated instruments that have a short term rating of A1+ and remainder in A1. LIBID is the interest rate at which banks bid to borrow money off other banks. In reality this rate is set marginally below LIBOR which is the average interbank lending rate.