The final list of companies making the Russell family of indexes was released on Monday.

With some $4 trillion in assets benchmarked to the product line, several exchange-traded funds are set to show a bit different makeup. The process actually was finished on Friday, but complete final results weren't made public into today.

So what's different?

Last year's destruction of wealth didn't spare many asset classes or markets. The Russell Global Index lost slightly less than $20 trillion in market-cap size. And its U.S. stock counterpart, the Russell 3000, was shaved by just shy of $6 trillion in market-cap wealth.

"It was a really indiscriminate sell-off," said Stephen Wood, chief market strategist for North America at Russell Investments, on Monday after the final names were made public.

"Coming into March 2009, all non-Treasuries sold off dramatically. There was a destruction of portfolio wealth across the world."

Perhaps just as significantly, three of the top five biggest companies in the global Russell index are now Chinese. And PetroChina (NYSE: PTR) replaced Exxon Mobil (NYSE: XOM) as No. 1 (by market capitalization size, not weighting, since only a small fraction of PTR's total is available to foreign investors).

Also, the change in leadership came by just a whisker, Wood pointed out. The top five names in the benchmark in terms of sheer market cap sizes are now (in order): PetroChina ($348.1 billion); Exxon Mobil ($338.4 billion); ICBC ($211.8 billion); China Mobil (NYSE: CHL) at $195.8 billion and Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) at $194.6 billion.

Here's the global top five by actual weightings in the index:

• Exxon Mobil (1.44%)

• Microsoft (0.685%)

• HSBC Holdings (0.66%)

• BP Plc (0.65%)

• Johnson & Johnson (0.64%)

Bigger Picture

Wood said although the bragging rights for top market cap dog globally is almost a statistical dead heat now, it's indicative of a larger trend taking place over the past several years. During the mortgage meltdown and recession, he believes the index numbers show the pace of that move by investors globally into China has increased in pace and depth.

As developing markets gradually open to more foreign investment, the differences in market cap sizes and index weightings figure to fall more into line, notes Wood.

"In the past two years, we've really seen more quantitative evidence mounting about a shift in investment dollars flowing into China and related countries," he said. "The move up by PetroChina might not be significantly great in a strict statistical sense, but it's going to grab some headlines. The transition in global economic power is under way."

In sectors, tech moved ahead of financials in the Russell 1000, which is mainly made up of large-cap names. At least part of that's being credited to the fact that tech firms typically carry less debt and weren't impacted as heavily as other sectors by the credit crunch.

In the Russell 2000, financials still claimed a large lead. That reflects how heavily the sector was hammered in the credit crisis, as more and more financials either went under or fell into small-cap territory.

Every sector fell in value in the U.S. benchmarks. But that decline wasn't equal across the board. For example, consumer staples dropped more than 17%, while materials fell 46.5%.

Russell's site includes a complete list of constituents, many of which will be showing up in exchange-traded funds sampling the index. Those include: the iShares Russell 1000 Index (NYSE Arca: IWB); the iShares Russell 2000 Index (NYSE Arca: IWM) and the iShares Russell 3000 Index (NYSE Arca: IWV).

You can view all of the individual additions and deletions, by index, here. You can view the schedule of how the process progressed, by date, and full descriptions of the methodologies used here.

Here are some basic factoids coming out of the most recent annual reconstitution process:

• The Russell 3000's total market capitalization reflected a 35.8% drop from a year earlier. It stood at $10.6 trillion at the end of Friday. That figure was 42.7% less than the 2007 high of $18.5 trillion.

• The Russell 3000 had 278 deletions, slightly less than the previous period. Most of those came from micro-caps which were moving up into the benchmark.

• Pennsylvania had the most net additions (15), with New York next (13) in the total stock market index.

• The largest sector of the reconstituted Russell 1000 was technology (16.2%), which also experienced the next-largest increase in sector weight (1.5%), second only to health care (1.9%).