US – Diedrich Coffee Joins Russell 2000 Index

IRVINE, Calif. – Diedrich Coffee, Inc. was added to the U.S. small-cap Russell 2000® Index after the equity markets closed on June 26, 2009, said the company in a statement.

Membership in the Russell 2000, which remains in place for one year, is based on membership in the broad-market Russell 3000 Index. The company was also added to the Russell 2000 Growth style index.

Annual reconstitution of Russell’s U.S. indexes captures the 4,000 largest U.S. stocks ranked by total market capitalization as of the end of May. Russell determines membership for its equity indexes primarily by objective market-capitalization rankings and style attributes.

The Russell 3000 also serves as the Us component to the Russell Global Index, which Russell launched in 2007. Russell indexes are widely used by investment managers and institutional investors for index funds and as benchmarks for both passive and active investment strategies. An industry-leading $4.4 trillion in assets currently are benchmarked to them. These investment tools originated from Russell’s multi-manager investment business in the early 1980’s when the company saw the need for a more objective, market-driven set of benchmarks in order to evaluate outside investment managers.

The Russell 2000 Growth Index measures the performance of the small-cap growth segment of the U.S. equity universe. It includes those Russell 2000 companies with higher price-to-value ratios and higher forecasted growth values.

The Russell 3000 Index measures the performance of the largest 3000 U.S. companies representing approximately 99% of the investable U.S. equity market.