Look-through
Portfolio look-through: what you actually own
A fund's name tells you its strategy. Look-through tells you which companies your money is actually in, and how much of it is in each.
What look-through is
Holding an ETF means holding a slice of every company in it. Look-through replaces the fund on your holdings list with those companies, in the proportions its issuer published.
Do that for every fund you hold and add the results together, and six tickers become one list: the companies you own through all of them, stated in dollars.
How the calculation works
Four steps, applied to every fund in turn:
- Start with your dollar position in the fund.
- Multiply that position by each of the fund's published weights, which turns a percentage into dollars.
- Match each line to one canonical company, so a company held by four funds is recognised as one company rather than four.
- Add the dollars by company across every fund. The total is your real position in each one.
The hard part is the matching
The arithmetic is straightforward. Getting the names to line up is not: issuers write the same company differently between files, tickers are reused across exchanges, and a company can appear as an ordinary share in one file and as a depositary receipt in another.
Matching every line to a single canonical security is what makes the totals trustworthy, and it is the step that decides whether a portfolio's largest position is reported once or split in half.
Funds that hold other funds
Some diversified ETFs hold other ETFs rather than shares — a single ticker containing an Australian fund, a global fund, a small-companies fund and a bond fund.
Unwrapping one of those takes two passes: the wrapper's weights in each underlying fund, then each of those funds' own holdings. The output is the same list of companies, but it depends on both sets of files, and it is only as current as the older of them.
What it changes about a portfolio view
A holdings list of six tickers can hide the fact that one company is the largest single position in it. Look-through states that position as a figure instead of leaving it implied.
The same pass shows how much of a portfolio sits in one country, one sector or one currency once every wrapper is removed — facts that no individual fund's factsheet can report, because none of them knows about the others.
The words on the page
- Position
- The dollar value held in one fund or, after look-through, in one company.
- Wrapper
- A fund whose holdings are other funds rather than shares held directly.
- As at
- The date the issuer published the holdings a figure is calculated from.
What this can't tell you
- Weights are as at the issuer's publication date, not today's market.
- Where funds publish on different clocks, a combined figure is only as current as the oldest file behind it.
- A fund that discloses part of its portfolio can be unwrapped only as far as it discloses.
- Unlisted managed funds and platform products publish far less than listed ETFs, so a portfolio holding them can be unwrapped only in part.
Where to go next
Written and signed by a named author, dated the day it was last looked at. How we source our data · Editorial policy