Summary: The most important measurement for the effectiveness of a CEF fund advisor is “value-add”: the amount of relative incremental investment value generated as a result of its stewardship of its fund’s investments. This is particularly important in this day-and-age where there is a plethora of low cost, easily-assessable, indexed, investment alternatives such as ETFs.

Eqcome CEF Value-Added Management Rankings: In an effort to determine which of the CEF’s managements were adding the most value for their shareholders, a sample of 160 CEFs were processed through the Eqcome CEF Value-Added Management Rankings model (Eqcome CEF “VAMR”).

Turkey is not only a major modern economy, it is also the largest economy in the Middle East. It is much larger than Iran and perhaps the only truly modern economy in the entire Muslim world. Most importantly, in a global world it sits between Europe, the Middle East and Russia. The Ottoman Empire by the sixteenth century controlled not only North Africa, but also southeastern Europe, the Russian Caucasus and the Arabian Peninsula.

Economic Background: Placed 41st in Forbes' 2009 Best Countries for Business:

Because demographics can help make or break a country’s economy, investors should pay attention to country-specific demographic trends when considering long-term investments in the global market. The “long-term” is stressed in the preceding sentence because demographic changes are relatively slow in the making; thus demographics are not especially helpful for short-term trades.

When considering demographics, more than just birthrates and population growth need to be examined, as all population characteristics–such as death rates, life expectancies, migration trends, median ages, and populations by age groups, to name a few–can impact the economy. Demographics is not an exact science with absolute numbers and is therefore not a perfect tool for gauging a country's economic prospects, but it does serve as a good barometer for the potential future strength or weakness of an economy.