STT State Street Corporation

State Street Global Advisors (SSgA), the investment management arm of State Street Corporation (NYSE:STT) and the largest institutional fund manager in the world, today announced the launch of its new Global Alpha Plus Strategy, designed to provide institutional investors with more efficient active returns in global equity markets. The new strategy has been lead-designed by the local quantitative investment team at SSgA in Australia, in conjunction with the firm's pioneering global Advanced Research Center. Global Alpha Plus builds on the key tenets of SSgA's Australian Alpha Plus Strategy, utilising a consistent quantitative ranking and selection process to evaluate stocks on a global basis, and enabling up to 30 percent short positions to achieve higher expected returns. The Australian Alpha Plus Strategy was launched in January 2005 and has quickly filled to capacity. Global Alpha Plus aims to fill a gap in the market for higher-risk, higher-return international equities products, while maintaining a highly efficient risk/return trade-off. Efficiency is maximized by the loosening of long-only constraints, which allows the manager to take underweight as well as overweight positions - (the freedom to pick 'losers' and 'winners'). Lochiel Crafter, chief investment officer of State Street Global Advisors, Asia Pacific, said institutional investors around the globe have strong interest in innovative strategies that give managers far greater opportunity to add value. "Big investors, focused on achieving more alpha in their portfolios, are loosening risk constraints and introducing elements such as shorting. Investors need to be comfortable, however, that the strategies are achieving alpha efficiently at low levels of risk," said Crafter. "By applying a disciplined, well researched and proven process operating across a broad universe of stocks, we aim to provide our customers with this comfort level and to achieve consistent value-added performance." Global Alpha Plus will invest across a well-diversified portfolio of approximately 300 stocks and maintain a neutral bias to style, capitalization, industry and region. The strategy will take active risk of approximately 4-5 percent per year, and include the ability to take short positions up to 30 percent, with market exposure maintained at 100 percent. The strategy will be managed against the MSCI World Total Return Index(SM) and will aim to outperform its benchmark by 4-5 percent per year over rolling three-year periods. The strategy does not include active currency management. The new strategy adds to SSgA's already extensive range of global equities strategies, which span the risk/return spectrum. These include, in increasing risk/return order, a passive strategy, Enhanced Global Index Plus, Active Long-Only Global Alpha, the new Global Alpha Plus, and the Global Long-Short Strategy. SSgA has US$1.4 trillion in total worldwide assets under management, with global equities under management accounting for US$23.8 billion (as of June 30, 2005). SSgA delivers investment strategies and integrated solutions to clients worldwide across every asset class, investment approach and style. SSgA has investment centers in Boston, Hong Kong, London, Milan, Montreal, Munich, Paris, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, and Zurich, and offices in 28 cities worldwide. For more information, visit State Street Global Advisors at www.ssga.com. State Street Corporation (NYSE: STT) is the world's leading specialist in providing institutional investors with investment servicing, investment management and investment research and trading. With US$9.6 trillion in assets under custody and US$1.4 trillion in assets under management as of June 30, 2005, State Street operates in 25 countries and more than 100 geographic markets worldwide. For more information, visit State Street's Web site at www.statestreet.com.