Fees, Holdings, and Diversification
What an expense ratio really costs, where our fee data comes from, and how to read the holdings breakdowns.
Two things decide whether a fund deserves your money: what it holds and what it charges. The fund page dedicates a tab to each.
What an Expense Ratio Means
The expense ratio is the slice of your investment the fund keeps every year — a 0.50% ratio means 50 cents of every 100 dollars you have invested, every year, taken quietly out of the fund's returns rather than billed to you. Small differences compound: over decades, a fraction of a percent is real money.
Where the Fee Data Comes From
Our primary market-data feed doesn't have a fee figure for every fund, so we fill the gaps straight from the funds' own SEC filings. When neither source has a number, the field shows blank.
The Fee Tools
On the Expenses tab of every fund page:
- Fee Calculator (free) — enter an amount and see the dollars the fund's ratio costs you over time.
- Lower-Fee Alternatives (free) — comparable funds that charge less, so you can see whether the fee buys anything.
- Cost Verdict (Pro) — our plain-language judgment on whether the fee is fair for what the fund does.
- Fee Compounding Forecast (Pro) — a 30-year projection of what the fee costs versus a cheaper alternative.
One related Pro card lives on the Dividend tab: NAV Erosion, shown on distribution-heavy funds — it checks whether a big headline yield is being paid out of the fund's own principal.
Holdings and Diversification
The Diversification tab — free for everyone — shows what the fund actually owns:
- Top Holdings with concentration stats: the combined weight of the biggest positions, plus an "effective holdings" figure — a fund can list hundreds of names but behave like it owns thirty if the top few dominate.
- All Holdings — the complete table, expandable to every position, so you can check whether a specific stock is inside.
- Sector and Country breakdowns — donut charts showing where the fund is concentrated, plus an Asset-Class snapshot of what kind of fund it is. Useful for spotting overlap: two funds with different names can hold nearly the same portfolio.
Every holding links to its own stock page, so drilling from a fund into its companies takes one click.
Frequently Asked Questions
The expense ratio on a fund page is blank — is the fund free?
No. Blank means we could not confirm a figure from our data feed or the SEC filings we parse — it never means 0.00%. Check the fund’s prospectus, and treat an unverifiable fee as a caution flag.
How do I check if two of my funds hold the same stocks?
Open the Diversification tab on each fund and compare the top holdings and sector breakdowns. If both are dominated by the same handful of names, you own the same bet twice.