New York: Standard & Poor's, which last month changed the way it defines US-based companies, added more than 100 companies to its Total Market Index based on the new criteria, a precursor to entering gauges such as the S&P 500.

The stocks, which range from Accenture Plc to Tyco International Ltd. and Noble Corp., won't go into the better-known indexes right away. They will be added on an "as-needed basis" as mergers and corporate events cause others to fall out, according to a statement.

Smaller companies may be added to the S&P MidCap 400 or S&P SmallCap 600, the firm said.

"If all the newly eligible companies were added to the S&P 500, the resulting turnover would be unusually large compared to recent experience," S&P said on in an e-mail release. "Therefore, there will be no immediate reconstitution of the S&P 500 to include these companies."

S&P revised its definition of what constitutes a US company on May 11.

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Companies qualify if they file annual reports and aren't considered a foreign entity by the Securities and Exchange Commission; they have more fixed assets and sales in the US than anywhere else; the shares are listed by NYSE Euronext and Nasdaq OMX Group Inc in the US; and corporate governance is consistent with American practices.

The companies will join the S&P Total Market Index after the close of trading on June 18. The order in which they are placed in smaller indexes hasn't been determined yet, said David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee, in an interview.

"Who goes first, who goes second, we don't know yet," he said. "In terms of the 500, we're not going to take a bunch of these and put them into the index right away because it would cause a lot of turnover."

The index operator did provide a glimpse of which companies are the candidates for S&P 500 inclusion by excluding them from its Completion Index, which usually contains TMI companies that aren't in the S&P 500.

Companies added to the S&P 500 often rise in price as managers who mimic the index buy shares. Funds that track the S&P 500 have more than $1 trillion in assets, according to S&P.

The following are companies that are being excluded from the S&P Completion Index, which usually contains companies in the Total Market Index that aren't in the S&P 500.

S&P said it won't add companies to the Completion Index when it rebalances the gauge this month if their market value was over $3.5 billion, the minimum size for entry into the S&P 500, on May 28.

Accenture, Arch Capital Group, Autoliv Inc, Axis Capital Holdings, CIT Group Inc, Cooper Industries, Covidien, Garmin, Genpact, Ingersoll-Rand, Marvell Technology Group, Noble Corp, PartnerRe, Seagate Technology Trans-ocean, Tyco Electronics, Tyco International, Warner Chilcott and Weatherford International.