Tag: NVIDIA

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What companies are in my retirement portfolio?

RobH1 Comment

I cover what I hold in my retirement portfolio every month (latest update is here), but as you can see, I only hold ETFs. What’s underneath the ETFs? Let’s take a look!

Calculating this is straightforward:

  1. Use the percentages I have of each ETF from the June update
  2. Look at the “Holdings” section of ETF or in the case of AOA/XGRO/XEQT, “Aggregate Underlying Holdings”1 and write down the percentages of each stock. I stopped when I accounted for 20% of each ETF.
  3. Multiply (1) by (2) and add them all up.

By doing this exercise, I can now account for the 20 companies that make up 20% of my retirement portfolio:

These 20 companies are really the tip of my personal investment iceberg — my aggregate retirement portfolio has at least 32,000 holdings, since that’s what’s actually inside AOA, the one ETF I own with the most holdings2. But the fate of these 20 companies will have an outsized influence on the overall performance of the portfolio. The only surprise for me is that there is only one company outside North America in the list. I would have expected one or two more.

It will be interesting to see what kind of differences I see once I complete kicking USD out of my retirement portfolio and go back to a list of only seven magnificent ETFs. I’m not sure there will be big changes, given that I’m keeping my asset allocations constant throughout, but I’m expecting some differences3. We’ll see come January 2027, I guess.

Just for fun, and given my recent article on the SpaceX IPO, I wanted to know how much I held of that particular company. AOA hasn’t included it yet4, but XGRO and XEQT have already. As of June 30, 0.02% of my portfolio is invested in SpaceX.

  1. In most cases, as of June 30. VFV only shows to May 30. ↩︎
  2. XGRO has 22000, for reference. I think the extras in AOA come mostly from fixed income (bond) products since they have broader geographic coverage. ↩︎
  3. The biggest changes won’t be visible since they occur in the bond side of my holdings. AOA and XGRO have very different approaches to this part of the market, but as it’s only 15% of my retirement holdings, they don’t show up as a “top” holding in my retirement portfolio . ↩︎
  4. And won’t until SpaceX is profitable. AOA includes IVV, which is an S&P 500 index fund, and the S&P 500 requires companies to be profitable before inclusion in that index. ↩︎

Capped Index Funds: Good Idea?

RobHLeave a comment

One nagging concern I’ve heard about index investing1 is that you can end up overly concentrated in a handful of stocks. For example, as of today, per XGRO’s fact sheet, for every $100 I have invested in XGRO, I’m actually investing almost $5 between two companies, NVIDIA and Microsoft. And for every $100 I have invested in AOA, it’s $7 in these two companies. Although that sounds like it might be a significant concentration, I found a way to test the correlation using https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/asset-correlations. As you can see, XGRO and NVIDIA are not terribly well-correlated:

Not very strong correlation between XGRO and NVIDIA

…even though perhaps I perhaps wish they were (sigh):

Wishing XGRO was more strongly correlated with NVIDIA…

Anyway, if you’re still not comfortable with having too much concentration in your holdings, there are ETFs that limit exposure to any one stock in an index. iShares launched an ETF last year that tracks the S&P 500 while limiting the contribution of any member of that index to 3%. That product is called XUSC, which serves as a complement to its XUS uncapped S&P 500 ETF2. So when you compare XUS’s top holdings to those of XUSC, you can quickly spot the difference:

Top HoldingsXUS (S&P 500)XUSC (capped S&P 500)3
NVIDIA7.86%3.49%
Microsoft7.09%3.12%
Apple5.90%3.07%
Amazon4%3.07%
Meta2.86%2.93%
Broadcom2.49%2.96%
Alphabet class A2%1.66%
Tesla1.73%2.05%
Alphabet class C1.63%1.35%
Berkshire Hathaway1.62%1.93%
Comparing top % holdings between XUS and XUSC as of July 2025

For the TSX, there’s not a full equivalent. The closest pairing for the TSX is XIC4 and XIU:

TickerIndexCapped?# of stocks
XICS&P/TSX Capped CompositeYes214
XIUS&P/TSX 60No615

XIC holds a lot more companies, and in addition to capping any single company, this has the effect of shifting the emphasis to smaller companies. So does this make a big difference in performance? Let’s check using this calculator.

So not much difference; over the past 5.5 years, we see a very slight edge to XIU, the uncapped TSX60 fund.

Whether the relationship between XIU and XIC will be the same as XUS/XUSC is anybody’s guess. In my own case, I don’t own the capped version of the S&P 500, but I do own XIC over XIU, mostly because of its significantly lower MER (0.06% versus 0.18% for XIU).

  1. And my biggest holdings (AOA and XGRO) are nothing more than a collection of index funds: S&P 500, TSX, MSCI EAFE… ↩︎
  2. There’s also currency-hedged variants of these, but I never bother with hedging, it just adds expense and tracking errors. ↩︎
  3. You may wonder why an ETF that advertises itself as capping components at 3% has components that exceed 3%. I also have this question. I suppose they probably only trade when the exception is maintained for a period of time, or perhaps by a more significant margin. Otherwise, they’d trade stocks that hovered around the 3% threshold excessively. ↩︎
  4. The “C” is either for “Capped” or “Composite”, you decide. ↩︎
  5. I can’t explain why a “TSX 60” ETF has 61 assets. Maybe they count cash as the 61st? ↩︎