Community question: do your ETFs overlap more than you think?

Friday closed a tough week for most ASX sectors. Resources offered a rare bright spot. And a question worth sitting with this weekend: is your portfolio more concentrated than it appears?

A question worth sitting with

Owning three or four ETFs can feel like a well-spread portfolio. But many broad-market and thematic ETFs hold the same large companies inside them, sometimes the same top ten names appearing across all of them. So a portfolio that looks like four separate bets can actually be one very concentrated bet on a handful of big stocks, repeated.

Have you ever looked underneath your ETFs to see which companies appear in more than one of them, and did anything surprise you?

What moved today

It was a broad selloff across most of the market. Consumer Discretionary led the falls, dropping 3.18 per cent, with Information Technology close behind at minus 2.38 per cent. Real Estate, Consumer Staples and Materials all fell between 1.19 and 1.45 per cent. The selling was wide rather than concentrated in one corner.

The clearest exception was in the lithium and resources names. LTR gained 4.37 per cent, PLS was up 4.08 per cent and KAR added 2.95 per cent. FMG rose 2.09 per cent and gold miner NST added 1.81 per cent. Hard commodities moved against the broader tide, a reminder that different parts of the market can behave very differently on the same day.

A lesson worth keeping

One of the most common things experienced investors say is not that they wish they had invested more money earlier. It is simply that they wish they had started earlier, with whatever they had at the time. Time in the market compounds in a way that extra capital added later cannot easily replicate.

The practical version of this is straightforward. Starting small and imperfect beats waiting until you feel ready. Readiness, for most people, never quite arrives on its own. A modest beginning, made today, has a head start on a larger one made next year.

PortLens Daily is general information only and is not personal financial advice. Have a good weekend, and we will be back on Monday.