Holdings

In detail

A fund's holdings are the underlying securities it owns — the actual stocks or bonds you get exposure to when you buy a share of the fund — each carrying a weight that says how much of the portfolio it represents. Most ETFs disclose holdings daily; mutual funds typically report quarterly with a lag. Reading them is how you find out what a fund actually is, as opposed to what its name suggests. A "technology" fund and a "growth" fund frequently hold many of the same companies, and two funds tracking broad US equity can overlap almost completely. If you own several funds, checking their top holdings against each other is the fastest way to discover that you are far less diversified than the number of tickers in your account implies. Weight is where the risk hides. A market-cap-weighted fund concentrates in whatever has grown largest, so the top ten positions can account for a third or more of the portfolio — meaning the fund's return is substantially determined by a handful of companies, regardless of how many hundreds it nominally holds.