The same stocks, bought twice

Investors often add a second or third ETF to broaden their exposure. We took 15 popular US ETFs, read their official holdings, and did the look-through math. The result shows how often the same large stocks appear through different fund wrappers — and how to check the repeated holdings in your own portfolio.

1. Some different funds share most of their holdings weight

Overlap here is weight-based: for every stock two funds share, we take the smaller of the two weights and add them up. It answers a plain question — what share of your money ends up in the same stocks either way? Here's how the popular pairs score.

Holdings overlap does not measure correlation, volatility, geographic or factor exposure, fees, or suitability. A high or low overlap score is a description of shared holdings, not an investment recommendation.

VOO and IVV are both S&P 500 funds, so 99.6% is expected — yet plenty of people hold both, thinking two providers means two bets. The more surprising ones are the growth funds: VUG and SCHG have 79.1% shared holdings weight, while 50.7% of QQQ's portfolio weight overlaps with VOO in this snapshot.

2. The stocks you own no matter what

Cut it the other way — which companies show up across the most funds? Of the 15 popular ETFs we looked at, a handful appear in two-thirds or more of them. Buy almost any mix and you're buying these again.

Note what's not here: no single household name dominates the list the way you'd guess. It's semiconductors and quiet compounders — Texas Instruments, Broadcom, Fastenal, Costco — riding along inside index after index.

3. An equal-weight three-fund example

This example combines an S&P 500 fund, a Nasdaq-100 fund, and a dividend fund — VOO + QQQ + SCHD, equal amounts in each. Run the look-through and 123 stocks turn out to be held by more than one of them, and your ten biggest positions still add up to 28.1% of the whole portfolio:

NVIDIA alone is over 5% of this example portfolio, arriving through both VOO and QQQ. SCHD contributes additional holdings that are not present in the other two funds, alongside stocks that the funds share.

Why this keeps happening

Almost every popular ETF is cap-weighted: the bigger the company, the more of it the fund holds. Since the same dozen mega-caps are the biggest companies in nearly every slice of the US market, they float to the top of many funds. Adding a second cap-weighted fund therefore does not guarantee a largely new stock basket: it can add portfolio weight to the same large companies. This is not a flaw in either fund; it is a holdings fact that becomes visible when you look through the wrappers to the stocks underneath.

Check your own portfolio

Every number above came from a free tool anyone can run. Enter your funds and dollar amounts and you'll see your true combined exposure — which stocks you really own, and how much:

See the VOO + QQQ + SCHD breakdown live →

Prefer it in the language of the old Morningstar Instant X-Ray? That tool was retired in 2025; the free Morningstar Instant X-Ray alternative rebuilds its stock-intersection view.

Methodology & reuse

Holdings come from official issuer files and SEC filings — no third-party estimates. Overlap is the sum of the smaller weight across every shared holding, matched by security identifier; portfolio look-through weights each fund by its dollar amount and sums each stock's weight through. Full detail is on our methodology page, and every figure is reproducible in the calculator. Numbers are a snapshot as of July 2026 and shift as holdings update.

Journalists and writers: you're welcome to cite these figures with a link to this page. The underlying pair and holdings data is browsable at overlapcheck.com/etfs and /stocks if you want to check a specific fund or company.