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How to read an ETF's holdings
Last updated: November 3, 2026
An ETF is a basket. When you own a share of one, you own a small slice of everything inside it. The holdings list is the label on the basket: every company in it, and how much of the fund each one takes up. Reading it tells you what you actually own, and which few companies decide most of how the fund does.
Where the list comes from
US funds report their holdings to the SEC on Form N-PORT. It lists every position the fund held on one date, what each was worth, and the fund's total size. The report for the last month of each quarter is made public, about 60 days after the date it covers.
So a holdings list from the SEC is always a little old. Most fund companies also post a daily list on their own websites, which is newer but isn't a filing. Leftagraph shows the SEC's, and says which date it covers.
What a weight means
Next to each holding is its weight: the value of that holding as a share of the whole fund. A 7% weight means 7 cents of every dollar in the fund sits in that one company.
In most index funds, weight follows company size. The bigger a company's market value, the more of the fund it takes up, so the largest companies sit at the top. On June 30, 2026, the top three in VOO, Vanguard's S&P 500 fund, were NVIDIA (7.51%), Apple (6.59%) and Microsoft (4.30%).
A 500-company fund can lean on ten
Add up the top ten weights and you see how spread out a fund really is:
- VOO: 520 positions, and the top ten held about 36% of the fund (June 30, 2026).
- QQQ, which follows 100 large Nasdaq companies: 105 positions, and the top ten held about 45% (June 30, 2026).
- SCHD, a dividend fund: 102 positions, and its largest single holding, Merck, was 4.76% (August 31, 2026). Its rules keep any one company from growing as large.
None of these is good or bad. They're different recipes. The top of the list tells you which companies move the fund most.
Why "positions" isn't the number of companies
- One company, two lines. Alphabet has two kinds of shares that trade, GOOGL and GOOG. VOO held both, at 3.25% and 2.59%, so Alphabet as a whole was larger than either line.
- Things that aren't companies. Cash, short-term funds the fund parks money in, and futures it uses to stay fully invested all appear as positions.
- Overlap between funds. The same companies show up again and again. NVIDIA, Apple and Microsoft were in the top five of both VOO and QQQ, so owning both funds doubles up on them.
Look inside the companies
A holdings list says who is in the fund, not how they're doing. For that, open the companies themselves. Each one files its own statements with the SEC, the same as if you owned its shares directly.
See it on a real company NVIDIA, the largest holding in VOO and QQQ: revenue, net income and free cash flow Open the chart →When one company is 7% of a fund, its numbers matter to everyone who holds that fund.
The fund's size over time
Each N-PORT report also states the fund's net assets: everything it holds, minus what it owes. On June 30, 2026, VOO's were $1.67 trillion and QQQ's $490.1 billion. Net assets grow when the holdings rise in value and when new money comes in, and shrink the other way, so the line shows the fund's size, not its return.
How Leftagraph shows it
- Each fund has a page at its ticker, for example leftagraph.com/VOO: the date the list covers, net assets over time, and every holding with its weight, largest first.
- Each holding links to its company's chart when we can match it to a US company that files with the SEC. A dash means no match, for example cash, a foreign company or a company that moved to a new SEC filer after the report's date.
- The largest holdings are charted side by side on the page. Pro adds the fund's share price and charts every company in it, sorted and filtered by the screener's figures.
- Weights and names are shown as the fund filed them. How holdings are matched to companies is on the methodology page: fund holdings.
Not investment advice. This page explains what a fund's holdings list shows, not what to do about it. Check important figures against the fund's own filings.
Read next
- How to read a balance sheetWhat a company owns, what it owes, and what is left for its owners.
- Net cash vs net debtOne sum with two names: what counts as cash, what counts as debt, and how to read the answer.
- Why a company's numbers differ from one site to the nextEight reasons, and how to find out which figure is right.
- Why a company's ticker can move to a new SEC filerSame business, same ticker, new SEC number, and why its history can seem to vanish.