Russell 2000 constituents

The Russell 2000 is published by FTSE Russell. Membership is decided entirely by rank, with no committee step at all. FTSE Russell ranks eligible US companies by total market value at one dated market close; the largest thousand form the Russell 1000 and the next two thousand form the Russell 2000, with a banding rule that leaves a company alone when it has drifted only marginally across the boundary.

The index weights its members by float-adjusted market value, so only the shares available to public investors count towards a company's weight. Reconstitution is semi-annual: the ranking is taken on the last business day of April and applied on the fourth Friday in June, and taken again on the last business day of October and applied on the second Friday in December. Newly listed companies are added quarterly in between. The move to two reconstitutions a year is recent, so an annual June-only description of the Russell indexes is out of date.

The Russell 2000 list on this page is read from the funds that track the index: Vanguard Russell 2000 Index Fund, iShares Russell 2000 ETF (IWM), iShares Russell 2000 ETF (IWM) daily basket. Every constituent list on Equibles is a tracking fund's own disclosed holdings. A fund that fully replicates an index holds each of the index's companies in index proportion, and a US fund has to disclose what it holds: every quarter in an SEC Form N-PORT filing, and, for most exchange-traded funds, every day in a holdings file published on the fund's own site. Reading the fund is what makes these lists publishable without licensing an index provider's feed, and it is why the figures beside each company are the fund's figures.

The two sources answer different questions. A daily holdings file is fresh, so it dates a change to the day it appeared. An N-PORT filing is quarterly and slower, but it is a filed document with an accession number, so it can be cited and checked by anyone. Both are kept, both are shown, and the published list is the freshest complete one.

A list is published only when it is complete. Each stored snapshot records how many holdings arrived against how many the filing itself reported, and a snapshot short of its own reported count is kept but never published and never compared against another. This is the failure worth guarding against: a list narrowed by our own coverage still looks like a full index, and comparing two narrowed lists manufactures additions and deletions that never happened.

Companies are matched to their pages by identifier and never by name. The order is the company's CUSIP, then an ISIN learned for that company, then the CUSIP embedded inside a US or Canadian ISIN, then the ticker the fund itself stated. A row that matches nothing is kept on the list under the name the fund reported rather than dropped, because dropping it would quietly shorten the index.

Weight is the company's share of the fund's equity holdings, computed from the value the fund reported for each position. The share count and value beside it are the fund's own position in that company, not the company's share count and not its market value, which is the likeliest way to misread this table.

Rank is simply position by weight within this list. The Russell 2000 holds the companies ranked roughly one thousand and one to three thousand by market value, and carries slightly more lines than that, because a company with more than one listed share class is held once for each class.

Additions and deletions here are derived, not announced. Two consecutive lists from the same fund are compared, so every change is dated to the window between them and both ends of that window are shown. A daily holdings file narrows a change to a single day; a quarterly filing narrows it only to the quarter. Where several funds track one index, the same change is recorded once per fund and collapsed into one event for reading, and the narrowest window wins.

None of this is official index data. A tracking fund follows its index closely and is not identical to it: it can hold a company a day or two before or after the index does, it holds cash the index does not, and its weights are its own. Where the two differ, the index provider is right and this page is a close reading of a fund.

Cash, futures and any non-equity position a fund holds are excluded, so this is the fund's equity sleeve rather than its whole portfolio. Weights are computed against that sleeve, which is what makes them comparable to index weights.