Catherine Yoshimoto
- Impact of Advanced Notice: Traders anticipate recon day adjustments, sometimes leading to overbought index additions and oversold deletions. This can result in counterintuitive recon day price movements.
- Reflecting on Past Year: The annual Russell recon not only reshuffles indexes but also serves as a reflection on the previous year's US equity market performance. The 2023 recon highlighted inflationary pressures, while the 2024 recon tells a more optimistic story.
- Market Performance: US equities rebounded from the 2022 downturn, with the Russell 3000 Index surging 22.1% over the past year. Large caps outperformed small caps, with the Technology industry driving the difference in performance.
To help address your questions, we’ve identified three important points to keep in mind ahead of the upcoming Russell recon:
1. The Russell recon follows a well-orchestrated timeline.
The Russell US Indexes are designed to reflect the ever-changing US equity market, and annual reconstitution is critical to maintaining accurate representation. Each year, the recon process involves redefining the breakpoints between large, mid, and small cap to ensure the previous year’s market changes are captured. We also reevaluate companies to determine where they lie along the investment styles spectrum.
This year and every year, the Russell recon process follows a well-orchestrated timeline that spans several weeks—giving market participants a transparent view into the key events leading up to recon day.
2024 Russell recon calendar
April-ranking month
May and June-transition months
2. Pricing pressure logic doesn’t apply on recon day.
Recon day typically concludes as one of the highest trading volume days of the year, with $134.4 billion traded across Nasdaq and NYSE on last year’s recon day. The closing value as a percentage of average daily volume on recon day has increased over the years, reaching nearly 35% in 2022.
The dramatically heightened trading volume on recon day leaves many investors wondering about the impact on stock prices—and whether the recon puts upward pricing pressure on additions to the indexes and downward pressure on deletions. However, short-term impacts of the Russell recon on constituent stock prices haven’t reliably followed this pattern.
The reason this pricing pressure logic doesn’t apply on recon day is we’ve designed the process to give investors considerable lead time before the actual index reconstitution takes place. Per the timeline above, this year our “rank day”—when we rank the eligible companies to form the preliminary recon portfolio—takes place on April 30, a full eight weeks before recon day. And beginning May 24th and into June, concluding on June 28th recon day, we’re communicating updates on the preliminary changes to the newly reconstituted Russell Indexes.
As a result of this advanced notice, traders get ahead of additions and deletions, and by the time the actual recon day arrives the impact is typically already priced into the stocks. In fact, at times trading in anticipation of the recon date goes too far—where adds are overbought and deletes are oversold. In these cases, actual recon day trades go in the opposite direction, with additions declining and deletions rallying.
3. It’s an occasion to reflect on the year behind us.
Our annual Russell recon is not only a time to reshuffle our indexes to reflect the present-day US equity market, but it’s also an occasion to look back on the previous year. Invariably, a compelling US equity market story emerges from examining Russell Index performance over the past year.
At the time of the 2023 recon, the previous year’s story had been largely about inflationary pressures and the rising rate environment—and their negative impact on US equities. Russell Index performance for the year ending April 2024 tells a considerably more optimistic story.
Over the past year ending April 22, US equities have continued to rebound from the 2022 market downturn, with the Russell 3000 Index surging 22.5%. Notably, performance was uneven across the large and small market cap segments that comprise the broad US equity index. The Russell 1000 Index—representing large caps—soared 23.2% while the small caps in the Russell 2000 Index returned a more modest 11.5%.
The Technology industry is primarily behind the large and small cap performance difference. After a hawkish Fed interest rate policy took its toll on large US tech companies in 2022, a perceived less aggressive Fed stance—combined with the prospect of growth in AI—has since been a reversal of fortune for US tech companies, and the industry has surged 44.6% over the past year.
While these trends have been a boon to many US companies, the biggest gains have been concentrated among the tech giants comprising the Magnificent Seven. A closer look at Russell 3000 industry performance for the one-year period illustrates the impact of the Technology industry rally.
Russell 3000® Index Industry Performance
Source: FTSE Russell, data as of April 22, 2024. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Please see the end for important legal disclosures.
Industry performance also reflects the Financial industry’s rebound in the second half of 2023, as US equities in the industry recovered from the March 2023 banking crisis, and continued to post gains in 2024.
Stay tuned for the next chapter
As we follow our recon process timeline in the weeks ahead, please visit our Russell recon page for the latest information and updates.
Postscript
Another question we often receive ahead of recon is how a company can join the Russell indexes. We’ve highlighted the most relevant index rules for prospective joiners in a separate insight.
Disclaimer
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