You might notice some ETFs will display a different number of holdings compared to the index they are tracking.
This can be for a few reasons, but most commonly you will find it is because of the ETF methodology or because it is a synthetic ETF.
With the methodology, it indicates whether the product is holding all index securities in the same weight as the index (replicating) or whether an optimised subset of index securities is used (optimised/sampled) in order to efficiently track index performance.
To understand more about synthetic ETFs, we have this FAQ which explains more What are Synthetic ETFs?
There are other reasons an ETFs' holdings might not add up, and we’ll summarise them in bullet points for ease of reading;
- A & B shares classes (We aggregate these up to 1 company holding)
- Funds within Funds. For example, the FTSE 100 includes Scottish Mortgage Trust, which holds stock in companies like (Tesla, Nvidia, Amazon). We include that underlying exposure
- We also don't show a holding that is <0.05% (so some of the very smallest holdings maybe excluded)
We’d like to add that sometimes, the timings of the updates to the data (ETFs) and how smaller holdings are displayed in various Funds (’Others’) can be delayed by the provider. We have an example of discrepancies in Vanguard securities in our Community page, which will explain this part more.