How 5,788 real portfolios actually invest: 2026 report

How many positions does a real portfolio hold?

The short answer is 5. That is the median: half of the portfolios hold 5 positions or fewer and the other half 5 or more. One in four holds 3 or fewer, and another one in four 9 or more.

The extremes are rarer than social media suggests. Only 14% of portfolios hold a single position and just 5% hold more than 20. We count as a position each different asset with units still held, even if it was bought in several goes.

More positions does not mean more diversification. A single MSCI World index fund already spreads your money across more than 1,200 companies, while ten stocks from the same sector are still a concentrated bet.

What do they invest in: funds, stocks, ETFs or crypto?

Investment funds come first: 54% of portfolios hold at least one, and 28% hold at least one index fund. Stocks appear in 45% of portfolios and ETFs in 33%. Cryptocurrencies bought directly stay at 2%, although some investors hold them through bitcoin ETFs.

Most portfolios stick to one type of asset: 37% hold only funds, 26% only stocks and 9% only ETFs. Just 27% combine two types or more. For investors in Spain there is a possible explanation: there you can switch from one fund to another without paying tax, but not between ETFs, so people who start with funds tend to stay with funds.

46% of portfolios received at least one dividend in the last twelve months. That the rest did not is not a sign they are not earning: accumulating funds and ETFs reinvest dividends inside instead of paying them out.

What are the most popular funds?

The most held fund is in less than 7% of portfolios. There is no fund that everybody owns: there are many funds that each turn up a little.

Nine of the top sixteen are index funds, and four of them track the same index, the MSCI World: Fidelity MSCI World Index Fund, Vanguard Global Stock Index Fund, iShares Developed World Index Fund and Amundi Index MSCI World. Next to them sit index funds for global small companies and emerging markets, which many use to round off the MSCI World.

Among the actively managed ones there are two Spanish value managers, Azvalor and Horos, a technology fund, a mixed fund (Gamma Global) and several bond or money market funds (Groupama Trésorerie, DNCA Alpha Bonds and Neuberger Berman Short Duration Euro Bond), which usually fill the more conservative part of a portfolio.

We count all the share classes of a fund as one: the euro class, the hedged class and the investor class of Vanguard Global Stock add up as a single fund. The list describes what investors hold; it is not a recommendation.

What are the most popular ETFs?

The most held one is not an equity fund: it is iShares Physical Gold, an ETC backed by physical gold, held in 5% of portfolios. The second is gold too, Invesco Physical Gold. Strictly speaking an ETC is not an ETF, but it is bought and sold on the stock exchange in the same way, so we count them together.

Then come the big indices (iShares Core MSCI World, iShares Core S&P 500 and Vanguard FTSE All-World) and thematic ETFs on defence and semiconductors. Four on the list trade in the United States: QQQ, SPY, VOO and IBIT. A retail investor in the European Union normally cannot buy them, because they lack the key information document (KID) that EU rules require.

ETFs are more spread out than funds: only twelve are held in more than 50 portfolios, the minimum we set ourselves to publish a figure.

What are the most popular stocks?

Microsoft and NVIDIA top the list, each in 8% of portfolios. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Meta follow: the six big US tech companies take the first six places.

The first Spanish ones are Banco Santander, Repsol and Iberdrola, each in 3% of portfolios, and Inditex, in 2%. The rest mixes more tech (Tesla, Micron and AMD) with defensive names such as Johnson & Johnson and Berkshire Hathaway.

Careful not to read the list as what people are buying now: it shows what they hold today, including purchases made years ago.

MSCI World and S&P 500: how many hold both?

21% of portfolios hold a fund or an ETF that tracks the MSCI World and 13% hold one that tracks the S&P 500. 30% hold at least one of the two.

4% hold both at once, 240 portfolios. Put another way: one in three portfolios with an S&P 500 fund also holds an MSCI World one.

Holding both is not a mistake, but it helps to know what you are buying. According to MSCI, as of September 30, 2026 US companies made up 72.9% of the MSCI World. Adding an S&P 500 to an MSCI World raises the weight of the United States, and of the same large companies, even further.

How much does the largest position weigh?

In the median portfolio, the largest position is 40% of the total, at market prices. Leaving out single-position portfolios, the median drops to 35%.

40% of portfolios have more than half of their money in one position, and 74% have more than a quarter. Among portfolios with two positions or more, three in ten have more than half in a single one.

A heavy largest position is not always a problem: if it is a global index fund, there are more than a thousand companies inside. It is one when that position is a single stock. In MyPortfolio you see the weight of each position in your portfolio and how it is split by sector and by country.

How much weight does Spain have in the portfolios of investors in Spain?

Here we only look at investors whose account is in Spain, two in three of the total. Of those who hold stocks, half (51%) hold at least one Spanish company. 30% have more than half of their stock money in Spanish companies, and 19% hold only Spanish stocks. This is what is called home bias.

Among those who hold any Spanish stock, the median weight of Spain in their stock holdings is 71%. For reference, the United States weighs 72.9% in the MSCI World and Spain is not even among the top four countries: the fourth, Canada, weighs 3.3% (MSCI, September 30, 2026).

In funds, 56% of investors in Spain who hold funds have at least one domiciled in Spain. That says nothing about where the fund invests: Azvalor Internacional and Horos Value Internacional are Spanish funds that invest mostly outside Spain.

How many portfolios beat the MSCI World over the last year?

Of the 2,320 euro portfolios with at least a year of history, 22% gained more than the MSCI World between October 6, 2025 and October 6, 2026. The index, measured with an MSCI World ETF in euros, rose 20.7%; the median portfolio, 11%. 92% of portfolios ended the year in positive territory.

The comparison has a catch, and it is worth saying: many portfolios do not try to beat a global equity index. Those holding bonds, money market funds or cash are after something else, and in a year when stocks rise 20% it is normal for them to fall behind. What is useful is comparing yourself with the index that looks like what you hold.

We use the TWR return, which measures how the investments did without deposits and withdrawals distorting it. The reference ETF reinvests dividends and deducts its 0.20% annual fee, so the bar is slightly below the pure index.

Methodology: which portfolios we counted and how

Data as of October 7, 2026, with valuations at the October 6 close. We started from all personal portfolios in MyPortfolio and left out those in leagues and tournaments, practice portfolios with made-up money, copies of community portfolios, internal, admin or deactivated accounts, portfolios with incomplete return data, those created less than a month ago and those with less than €1,000 or more than €5 million invested (or the equivalent in another currency). That leaves 5,788 portfolios from 3,783 investors.

A portfolio holds an asset if it still has units of it. We group the listings of the same security on different exchanges by its ISIN, and all the share classes of a fund as one fund. The asset type is the one on our asset page, not the one each user typed. The weight of each position is computed at market prices, using the 5,685 portfolios whose recomputed valuation matches the stored one within 5%.

For the one-year return we chain the daily TWR between October 6, 2025 and October 6, 2026, for euro portfolios only, and compare it with the euro price of the iShares Core MSCI World UCITS ETF on the same dates. It includes portfolios imported later with their full history, and that barely changes the result: of those already in MyPortfolio a year ago, 22% beat the index, and of those imported later, 21%.

Privacy: we only publish aggregate figures, each one computed over at least 50 portfolios, and we round percentages to whole numbers. We use no names and no individual portfolios. MyPortfolio users are not a sample of all investors: they are people who track their investments with a tool, and two in three have their account in Spain.

You can download the aggregate table as a CSV and reuse it with attribution, under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

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