George Russell only wanted to make his grandfather proud.

He didn’t plan to change the entire investing industry.

George started working at his grandfather’s business, Frank Russell Company, in 1958. Although it had been around for more than two decades, it was still pretty much a one-man show.

Frank Russell was a retired Wall Street stockbroker just looking to keep busy. So he worked with a handful of local clients.

George joined the team after graduating from Harvard Business School. Three months later, his grandfather died, and George found himself at the helm.

The company he helped build now manages nearly $400 billion in assets under management.

During George’s first decade leading the business, pension funds were booming. Companies would invest money on behalf of their employees so they’d be set for retirement. 

However, lots of funds struggled to pick good investments.

None of these pensioners knew what they were looking at. Pension funds had a tough time getting good data on their investments. Their managers and brokers would all come up with different numbers.

And that made measuring performance difficult.

George created the Portfolio Activity Report (“PAR”), the gold standard for measuring pension performance.

The report tracked a fund’s holdings, buys, and sells. It was a crucial single source of information for fund managers.

George and his team soon realized there was a lot of demand for a stock data “one-stop shop.” So the company began building indexes that tracked stock performance uniformly. Pension funds could use the data to make better investment decisions.

Even back in the 1980s, pension funds weren’t satisfied with doing well.

They wanted to beat the S&P 500. To do that, investors had to look outside the S&P 500.

So the Russell team took all the companies it could track—about 3,000 in total—and turned that data into its own index.

Most investors these days are familiar with the Russell indexes. The Russell 3000 is still pretty much the definitive universe of investible U.S. companies.

George and the team broke that up into two smaller indexes. They expected the Russell 1000 to be the more popular one. Since it holds the 1,000 largest publicly listed U.S. stocks, it’s closer to the S&P 500.

But to their surprise, the Russell 2000 became the crowd favorite.

Investors loved this list of smaller, less-covered stocks. Many realized that while these stocks were small, they could soon grow to be in the Russell 1000 or even the S&P 500.

The index gave them a chance to buy in earlier than ever.

Today, it’s still a huge deal for stocks to join the Russell 2000. They gain legitimacy, meaning a lot more investors can start buying in.

In fact, many institutional funds are required to buy what’s in the Russell. It’s the best way to track the index’s performance.

And since investors are starting much closer to the ground floor, there’s a lot more room for shares to run.

The S&P 500, the Nasdaq, and the Dow are still the world’s most popular stock indexes. That said, the Russell indexes provide some of the best investment-universe data out there.

Best regards,

Joel Litman & Rob Spivey
Chief Investment Officer &
Director of Research
at Valens Research

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