NEW YORK, Dec. 7, 2004 — Dow Jones Indexes, a leading global-index provider, and Wilshire Associates Incorporated, the world’s leading investment consulting, investment management and investment technology firm, today announced the early 2005 rollout of the Dow Jones Wilshire U.S. Style index benchmarks. The new index series will cover five investment “styles” — large-capitalization growth, large-cap value, small-cap growth, small-cap value and micro-caps — reflecting the make-up of the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 index.

“The new Dow Jones Wilshire Style Indexes will deliver style purity through coverage of the entire U.S. equity market,” said John A. Prestbo, Editor of Dow Jones Indexes. “With its transparent methodology, which, among other things, minimizes component turnover in the indexes, these new benchmarks will spotlight growth and value trends in the market. Where growth and value factors appear to be less important than size, the micro-cap segment rounds out the full-market coverage,” he noted.

“With the introduction of the new Dow Jones Wilshire Style Indexes, financial professionals will now have comprehensive benchmarks for not only the broad U.S. market but also for the U.S. market segments that matter to them most — growth and value,” said Dennis Tito, founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Wilshire Associates. “The inclusion of micro-caps as a fifth style allows for the entire economic space to be represented as a style universe with no artificial cut-offs of the market. The purity of the indexes makes them well suited as benchmarks and as the basis for investment products.”

The style indexes are part of the Dow Jones Wilshire index family that now includes a comprehensive set of U.S. indexes (broad-market, sector, size and style) and is planned to include a global composite. The unique advantage of Dow Jones Wilshire indexes is their breadth, but the benchmark appropriate family also provides consistent global coverage with an objective and transparent set of measures.

The Dow Jones Wilshire style indexes are broad enough to include all stocks for attribution analysis with a methodology that is among the most sophisticated being used by index providers. Six factors are used for style classification — some index providers use as few as one or two factors — and Dow Jones Wilshire classifies each stock as wholly either growth or value to eliminate overlap that can allow for undesirable “style drift” in stock portfolios.