PKS Products and Services

PKS is a SEC registered broker/dealer and a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the National Futures Association (NFA). PKS is also registered with the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB).

In order to afford you wide ranging access to financial products and solutions, PKS maintains relationships with every major Investment Company, most insurance companies offering variable products and many of the top professional money managers in the country. Through National Financial Services, LLC (“NFS”) an extensive array of products and services are available to PKS clients. These products and services include equities, fixed income products, mutual fund solutions, fee-based solutions, retirement products and programs, managed futures and wealth management programs.

As part of our effort to provide you with quality service, we have an agreement with NFS to supply trade execution, clearing, and other related services for your brokerage account. This includes certain asset protection programs that further help safeguard the security of your investments.

Both NFS and PKS are members of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC), which was created to protect customers of member broker/dealers when a brokerage firm is closed due to bankruptcy or other financial difficulties and customer assets are missing from accounts.

SIPC protects covered securities in accounts carried by NFS up to $500,000 (including cash claims, which are limited to $100,000). Within certain limits, SIPC coverage applies to both investor securities held by NFS and cash on deposit that will be used to purchase securities, or that has been generated from the sale of securities. When analyzing your SIPC coverage, you should consider the following additional facts:

• Your cash balances awaiting reinvestment are protected up to $100,000, which is included in the $500,000 coverage.
• These limits are on a per-customer basis, as defined in the Securities Investor Protection Act.
• Most types of securities held in a brokerage account at National Financial Services LLC are protected, including stocks, bonds, notes, debentures, certificates of deposit (CDs), and mutual funds, including money market funds.

For details, please see www.sipc.org.

To supplement its SIPC coverage, NFS has arranged for additional protection for cash and covered securities from Lloyd’s of London which currently has an A (Excellent) rating from ratings firm AM Best and an A+ (Strong) ratings with “Stable Outlook” from Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor’s. This additional protection (“excess SIPC”) covers up to an aggregate loss limit of $1 billion for all customer claims, of which $1.9 million may cover cash awaiting reinvestment at the individual account level. This is the highest level of excess SIPC coverage currently available. For more information on Lloyd’s of London, please go to www.lloyds.com.

It is important to bear in mind that SIPC coverage only applies when a brokerage firms is closed due to insolvency or other financial difficulties and then only if customer assets are missing from accounts. Excess SIPC protection would only be used were SIPC to be exhausted and then only for assets that would otherwise covered by SIPC. Finally, neither SIPC nor excess SIPC coverage protect against a decline in the market value of your securities.

If you have any additional questions about NFS, please go to www.mybrokerageinfo.com or feel free to contact your investment representative.

Mutual Fund Solutions

PKS offers access to thousands of funds from hundreds of fund families such as American Funds, Alliance, AIM, Eaton Vance and many more, through National Financials mutual fund supermarket, Institutional FundsNetwork^SM (IFN).

• IFN is one of the largest fund platforms in the industry, providing access to more than 11,000 share class alternatives from over 400 fund complexes. IFN allows you to offer and manage an extensive array of funds and omission structures, including A, B, and C shares, as well as hundreds of no-load funds.
• PKS also allows our investment executives to access fund families directly if you so choose.

PKS Financial Services

Purshe Kaplan Sterling is committed to providing clients with the best advice and products to protect assets, enable transfer of wealth and provide for family. That is the reason we created PKS Financial Services Inc., our affiliated insurance firm.

PKS Financial Services empowers each Investment Executive to work with our clients to properly explore and assess issues which profoundly affect their future. To accomplish this, our Investment Executives work with experienced in-house insurance professionals and draw from strategic alliances with outside financial and legal specialists.

Services include estate planning, business continuation planning, long-term care, life and disability insurance. PKS Financial Services pledges to be competitive in price and unsurpassed in service.

Fixed Income Products

We provide access to a fixed-income inventory product line that includes nationwide municipal bonds, mortgage-backed securities, and government-sponsored enterprises. Our Web-based, fixed-income platform, BondTraderPro,^® offers our investment representatives a single, online point of access to a broad array of new issue and secondary fixed-income products, while providing straight-through processing for most products. In addition, high-net-worth customers may take advantage of syndicate/new issue products and structured equity instruments.

Managed Futures

PKS is a member of the National Futures Association. The NFA is the industry-wide, self-regulatory organization for the U.S. futures industry. Managing risk by trading futures and options on futures contracts is a vital component of the global economy. Every business day, tens of millions of futures contracts are traded on an increasingly broad spectrum of products, including agricultural commodities, oil, precious metals, equities, treasury bonds, financial indexes and foreign currencies. Investor confidence is crucial to the success of the futures markets, and the best way to gain investor confidence is to ensure that the highest levels of integrity are demanded of all market participants and intermediaries. Membership in NFA is mandatory, assuring that everyone conducting business with the public on the U.S. futures exchanges-more than 4,200 firms and 55,000 associates must adhere to the same high standards of professional conduct.

Retirement Products and Programs

PKS's comprehensive line of Premiere Select® retirement products and selling tools offer you a wide variety of funding options and services to help meet retirement planning needs. From individual retirement products to turnkey plans for small businesses and private-label IRAs, these products can help maximize opportunity in the ever-competitive and growing retirement marketplace.

Our individual retirement offerings include Traditional, Roth, and Rollover IRAs, as well as the IRA-BDA (Beneficiary Distribution Account). Small-business retirement products include SIMPLE and SEP-IRAs, and Money Purchase/Profit Sharing Plan. Both individual and small-business offerings let you choose from more than 11,000 mutual fund share class alternatives, plus thousands of individual securities.

Structured Products

Structured Productsare synthetic investment instruments created to meet specific investor needs that cannot be met from the standardized financial instruments available in the financial markets. Structured products can be used: as an alternative to a direct investment; as part of the asset allocation process to reduce risk exposure of a portfolio; or to utilize current market trends. Interest in structured products has been growing in recent years and investors now use these instruments as a way to diversify investment portfolios. The market for derivative securities has grown quickly as well. The main reason for this lies in the economic function of derivatives; it enables the transfer of risk, for a fee, from those who do not want to bear it to those who are willing to bear risk.

The Benefits of Structured Products Can Include:

• Principal protection
• Tax-efficient access to fully taxable investments
• Enhanced returns within an investment
• Reduced volatility (or risk) within an investment

Structured Products Can Be Classified Under The Following Categories:

• Interest rate-linked notes
• Equity-linked notes
• FX and Commodity-linked notes
• Hybrid-linked notes

Purshe Kaplan Sterling recognizes the benefits that these Structured Instruments can bring to the appropriate investor universe and has formed strategic relationships with some of the largest financial institutions in the world to deliver tailored solutions to our Investment Executives, for the benefit of their clients.