Every S&P 500 Index Fund Owner Holds More Nvidia Than Apple

Put $10,000 into the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (NYSEMKT:VOO) and you own a slice of 520 stocks. But the slices are nothing like even. About $750 of that money lands in Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and about $658 in Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) -- and to me, the ordering of those two names says a lot about what an S&P 500 fund has become.

As of June 30, Nvidia was the fund's largest holding at 7.50% of assets, ahead of Apple at 6.58%, a gap approaching a full percentage point of the entire index. For years, Apple sat on top. Here's where the weights stand, how fast the switch happened, and what it means for anyone who owns an index fund and considers the matter settled.

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One company is 7.5% of the fund

The Vanguard S&P 500 ETF holds $1.05 trillion across those 520 positions, and the top of its list is an artificial intelligence (AI) supply chain in miniature. After Nvidia and Apple come Microsoft at 4.29%, Amazon at 3.61%, and Alphabet at 3.24% for its Class A shares alone. (Alphabet lists two share classes, so the company appears twice in the fund's holdings table.)

Those five positions total 25.22% of the fund. And the concentration runs slightly deeper than the list suggests: Count both of Alphabet's share classes, and the top five companies hold nearly 28% of every dollar invested.

The pattern runs down the list, too. Broadcom, another chip designer, sits sixth at 2.77%. And memory maker Micron, at 2.01% of the fund, had climbed into the fund's top 10 by the end of June, on the same AI demand lifting the names above it.

The switch is barely two years old

Nvidia first edged past Apple's market value on June 5, 2024, at about $3.02 trillion versus $2.99 trillion -- a $30 billion gap that made it the second-most valuable U.S. company at the time, behind Microsoft. Within two weeks, it had passed Microsoft as well, taking the top spot outright.

The lead has changed hands more than once since (Apple briefly retook the top spot in July). But Nvidia is now worth about $5.3 trillion to Apple's $4.5 trillion, a difference of about $800 billion.

No fund manager decided any of this. An S&P 500 (SNPINDEX:^GSPC) index fund weights companies by float-adjusted market value, not by results. Nvidia grew its revenue 85% year over year in its most recent fiscal quarter, to $81.6 billion, the market repriced it, and the index simply let the position swell. Apple didn't shrink. Nvidia outgrew it.

520 stocks, with 64% outside the top 10

The fund's 10 biggest positions account for 36.33% of assets. Put another way, of that $10,000 investment, about $3,633 goes into those 10 positions and $6,367 gets spread across the other 510 -- an average of about 0.12% each, or about $12 per position.

That's the arithmetic behind a point many index investors haven't fully absorbed. Owning "the whole market" today means making a sizable bet on a handful of AI-linked giants, with hundreds of small positions attached. And when Nvidia reports earnings after the market closes on Wednesday, Aug. 26, the fund's next trading day could come down to one company's results.

A concentrated index fund

This isn't a flaw in the fund. After all, concentration is what a market-value-weighted index does when a few businesses grow much faster than the rest, and it has served index investors well before. Apple's long run at the top came with enormous gains for anyone who simply held on.

The design also self-corrects. A market-value-weighted fund can concentrate on the way up and thin back out on the way down without a single trade. If AI leadership fades (and someday it may), the index demotes today's giants one trading day at a time, no decision required, all for a 0.03% expense ratio.

The flip side is arithmetic, too. A 20% Nvidia decline, all else equal, would clip about 1.5% off the whole fund by itself.

Still, the diversification an index fund's label promises is thinner at the top than it used to be. A quarter of the money rides on five companies. And more of it rides on Nvidia than on any other stock.

I think an S&P 500 fund remains the simplest way to own the U.S. market. It's just worth knowing what the weights say now. In meaningful part, this is a bet on the AI build-out.

Daniel Sparks and his clients have positions in Apple. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Broadcom, Micron Technology, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Vanguard S&P 500 ETF. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.