| VALUE LINE INCOME AND GROWTH FUND INC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Value Line Income and Growth Fund, Inc.
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Investment objective
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The Fund’s investment objectives are income, as high and dependable as is consistent with reasonable risk and capital growth to increase total return.
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Fees and expenses
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This table describes the fees and expenses that you may pay if you buy and hold shares of the Fund. There are no shareholder fees (fees paid directly from your investment) when you buy and sell shares of the Fund. Future expenses may be greater or less.
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Annual Fund Operating Expenses (expenses that you pay each year as a percentage of the value of your investment)
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Example
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This example is intended to help you compare the cost of investing in the Fund to the cost of investing in other mutual funds. The example assumes that you invest $10,000 in the Fund for the time periods indicated whether or not you redeem all of your shares at the end of those periods. The example also assumes that your investment has a 5% return each year, that the Fund’s operating expenses remain the same and that the fee waiver and expense reimbursement is in place through June 30, 2019 only.
Although your actual costs may be higher or lower, based on these assumptions your costs would be:
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Portfolio turnover
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The Fund pays transaction costs, such as commissions, when it buys and sells securities (or “turns over” its portfolio). A higher portfolio turnover rate may indicate higher transaction costs and may result in higher taxes when Fund shares are held in a taxable account. These costs, which are not reflected in annual fund operating expenses or in the example, affect the Fund’s performance. During the most recent fiscal year the Fund’s portfolio turnover rate for the Investor Class and the Institutional Class was 53% of the average value of its portfolio.
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Principal investment strategies of the Fund
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To achieve the Fund’s goals, the Adviser invests not less than 70% of the Fund’s net assets in common or preferred stocks or securities convertible into common stock which may or may not pay dividends. The balance of the Fund’s net assets are primarily invested in U.S. government securities, investment grade debt securities rated at the time of purchase from the highest (AAA) to medium (BBB) quality, other fixed income securities or cash equivalents. The Fund is actively managed by the Adviser, which seeks to purchase companies that have fundamentally strong market positions in growing industries that may enable those companies to increase future sales and earnings at an above average pace in the coming years. During the investment selection process, the Adviser performs fundamental and quantitative analysis on each company and utilizes the rankings of companies by the Value Line Timeliness™ Ranking System or the Value Line Performance™ Ranking System (the “Ranking Systems”) to assist in selecting securities for purchase or sale. The Ranking Systems are proprietary quantitative systems that compare an estimate of the probable market performance of each stock within a universe during the next six to twelve months to that of all stocks within that universe and ranks stocks on a scale of 1 (highest) to 5 (lowest). The universe consists of approximately 1,700 stocks of large-, mid- and small-market capitalization companies for the Value Line Timeliness Ranking System and approximately 2,900 stocks of smaller and mid-sized capitalization companies for the Value Line Performance Ranking System. The Adviser may sell securities for a variety of reasons, including when a company's business fundamentals deteriorate or a company's valuation has become less attractive in relationship to the company's future growth prospects. Other reasons include to secure gains, limit losses or redeploy assets into more promising investment opportunities. The Adviser has discretion, including whether and which ranked stocks to include within the Fund's portfolio, whether and when to buy or sell stocks based upon changes in their rankings, and the frequency and timing of rebalancing the Fund's portfolio. The Adviser will determine the percentage of the Fund's assets invested in each stock based on the stock's relative attractiveness taking into account the potential risk and reward of each investment. Incidental to its primary investment strategy, the Adviser may seek to hedge the Fund's interest rate exposure, or to profit from anticipated movements in interest rates, by investing in futures contracts on U.S. government securities and sovereign debt (such as interest rate futures on government bonds issued by the U.S., the U.K., Japan and Germany). The Adviser is not registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as a commodity trading advisor or commodity pool operator and limits the aggregate amount of the Fund's investments in commodity interests (such as futures contracts) to comply with an exemption from such registration. The Adviser does not intend to hedge the Fund's foreign currency exposure associated with futures contracts on sovereign debt. Accordingly, changes in foreign currency exchange rates will affect the value of such futures contracts. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Principal risks of investing in the Fund
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Investing in any mutual fund involves risk, including the risk that you may receive little or no return on your investment, and that you may lose money. Therefore, before you invest in the Fund you should carefully evaluate the risks. ■ Market Risk. The chief risk that you assume when investing in the Fund is market risk, which is the possibility that the securities in a certain market will decline in value because of factors such as economic conditions. Market risk may affect a single issuer, an industry, a sector of the economy, or the market as a whole.
■ Equity Securities Risk. Equity securities represent ownership in a corporation and their prices fluctuate for a number of reasons including issuer-specific events, market perceptions and general movements in the equity markets. The resulting fluctuation in the price of equity securities may take the form of a drastic movement or a sustained trend. If an issuer is liquidated or declares bankruptcy, the claims of owners of bonds will take precedence over the claims of owners of common stocks. Historically, the prices of equity securities have fluctuated more than bond prices.
■ Ranking System Risk. The Adviser's use of the results of the Ranking Systems in managing the Fund involves the risk that the Ranking Systems may not have the predictive qualities anticipated by the Adviser or that over certain periods of time the price of securities not covered by the Ranking Systems, or lower ranked securities, may appreciate to a greater extent than those securities in the Fund's portfolio.
■ Active Management Risk. Because the Fund is actively managed, its investment return depends on the ability of the Adviser to manage the Fund's portfolio successfully. There can be no guarantee that the Adviser's investment strategies will produce the desired results.
■ Interest Rate and Reinvestment Risk. The income on and market price of debt securities fluctuate with changes in interest rates. When interest rates rise, the market prices of the debt securities the Fund owns usually decline. When interest rates fall, the market prices of debt securities usually increase, but the Fund's income tends to decline. Such decline follows quickly for most variable rate securities and eventually for fixed rate securities as the Fund must reinvest the proceeds it receives from existing investments (upon their maturity, prepayment, buy-back, call, etc.) at a lower rate of interest or return. Generally, the market price of debt securities with longer durations or fixed rates of return will fluctuate more in response to changes in interest rates than the market price of shorter-term securities or variable rate debt securities, respectively.
■ Credit Risk. Credit risk is the risk that the issuer of a debt security will be unable to make interest or principal payments on time. A debt security's credit rating reflects the credit risk associated with the debt obligation. Generally, higher-rated debt securities involve lower credit risk than lower-rated debt securities. Credit risk is often greater for corporate, mortgage-backed, asset-backed, and foreign government debt securities than for U.S. government debt securities.
■ Derivatives Risk. Investing in derivatives, including U.S. and foreign interest rate futures contracts, may increase the Fund's volatility and risk of loss. Derivative positions typically are established with a small amount of cash relative to the total amount of investment exposure they generate, so the magnitude of any loss can be much greater than the amount originally invested by the Fund. The success of the Fund's investments in interest rate futures contracts is dependent on the Adviser's ability to correctly forecast the movement of interest rates in a given country. Even if the Adviser forecasts correctly, however, the success of the investment also depends on adequate correlation between the change in the relevant interest rate and the change in the value of the futures contract to the Fund. To the extent the Fund is investing in derivatives as a hedge, the success further depends on adequate correlation between the change in value of the futures contract and the change in the value of the portfolio position being hedged.
■ Foreign Currency Risk. The Fund's investments in foreign interest rate futures contracts, which are denominated in foreign currencies, are subject to the risk that such currencies will decline in value relative to the U.S. dollar.
■ Foreign Investments Risk. Investing in foreign securities poses additional risks. The performance of foreign securities can be adversely affected by the different political, regulatory and economic environments in countries where the Fund invests, and fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates may also adversely affect the value of foreign securities. In addition, emerging markets tend to be more volatile than the U.S. market or developed foreign markets.
■ Cyber Security Risk. As the use of technology becomes more prevalent in the course of business, the Fund becomes more susceptible to operational, financial and information security risks resulting from cyber-attacks and/or technological malfunctions. Successful cyber-attacks and/or technological malfunctions affecting the Fund or its service providers can result in, among other things, financial losses to the Fund and its shareholders, the inability to process transactions with shareholders or other parties and the release of private shareholder information or confidential Fund information. While measures have been developed which are designed to reduce the risks associated with cyber security, there are inherent limitations in such measures and there is no guarantee those measures will be effective, particularly since the Fund does not directly control the cyber security measures of its service providers, financial intermediaries or companies in which it invests or with which it does business.
■ Liquidity Risk. In October 2016, the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") adopted Rule 22e-4 under the Investment Company Act of 1940 (the "1940 Act"), which mandates certain liquidity risk management practices for open-end funds, including the Fund, by 2018. The precise impact the rule will have on the Fund and on the open-end fund industry has not yet been determined, but any related changes may negatively affect the Fund's expenses, yield and return potential.
An investment in the Fund is not a complete investment program and you should consider it just one part of your total investment program. An investment in the Fund is not insured or guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or any other governmental agency. For a more complete discussion of risk, please turn to page 35. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fund performance
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This bar chart and table can help you evaluate the potential risks of investing in the Fund. The bar chart below shows how returns for the Fund’s Investor Class shares have varied over the past ten calendar years. The table below compares the performance of the Investor Class and Institutional Class shares to the performance of both a broad based equity market index (the S&P 500® Index) and a custom index comprised of the returns of the S&P 500® Index (weighted 60%) and the Bloomberg Barclays Capital Aggregate Bond Index (weighted 40%), which is a broad based bond market index. The Fund’s past performance (before and after taxes) is not necessarily an indication of how it will perform in the future. Updated performance information is available at: www.vlfunds.com.
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Total Returns of Investor Class (before taxes) as of 12/31 each year (%)
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Best Quarter: Q2 2009 +11.29 Worst Quarter: Q4 2008 –13.78 After-tax returns included in the table below are shown for Investor Class shares only and are calculated using the historical highest individual federal marginal income tax rates and do not reflect the impact of state and local taxes. After-tax returns for Institutional Class shares will vary from those of Investor Class shares shown in the table below. Actual after-tax returns depend on an investor’s tax situation and may differ from those shown, and after-tax returns shown are not relevant to investors who hold their Fund shares through tax-deferred arrangements, such as 401(k) plans or individual retirement accounts (“IRAs”).
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Average annual total returns for periods ended December 31, 2016
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