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I’VE RECENTLY MADE the most significant change to my own portfolio in thirty five years. For the first time I’ve moved away from pure market-cap investing, tilting meaningfully toward Europe and Southeast Asia and bringing my US technology concentration down to around fifteen percent.
I’m retired. I don’t need to chase the outperformance that concentration might deliver, and I don’t need the potential volatility that comes with it. This is a personal position rather than any kind of recommendation; it’s nothing more than a risk management decision made at a point in life where I simply don’t need the risk.
What prompted it was a growing discomfort with something I suspect many everyday investors haven’t fully reckoned with: the S&P 500 is no longer quite the animal it once was.
A broad market index fund casts a wide net across the economy, and the S&P 500, which tracks the 500 largest US businesses by market value, has long been held up as the sensible default: low cost, well diversified, a bet on the whole rather than any one part of it. A sector fund works differently; it makes a deliberate, concentrated bet on a specific industry. If you believe technology is going to outperform the market as a whole, it gives you the ability to concentrate your capital into exactly the sector your research or gut instinct suspects is going to be the place to be and let it run.
The theory behind each is straightforward enough. A broad market fund captures a larger slice of the investment universe and is generally considered the lower-risk path. A sector fund comes with a well-understood trade-off: higher potential returns in good times, sharper drawdowns when sentiment turns. Investors who consciously choose a technology sector fund know what they’re signing up for. The risk profile is understood, accepted, and priced into the decision.
The problem is that the line between these two things has become a bit fuzzy, and most everyday investors haven’t noticed.
A handful of technology and technology-related companies (Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet) have grown so dominant in their market valuations that they now represent a disproportionate share of the entire index. During the last year, the top ten holdings have accounted for roughly a third of the total weight of all 500 companies.
The mechanism behind this is simply how the index works. The S&P 500 is market-cap weighted, meaning the bigger the company, the bigger its slice of the pie. As technology companies scaled their dominance through the 2010s and into the 2020s, their weight within the index ballooned accordingly. The index didn’t change its rules; the market just rewarded one particular group of companies so heavily that they came to dominate the scoreboard.
This means the investor who bought the S&P 500 believing they were spreading risk broadly across the American economy (energy, healthcare, financials, industrials, consumer staples) owns something that looks quite different to the story they were sold. You buy five hundred companies and a third of your money lands in ten stocks, most of them operating in the same broad technological ecosystem. That is a concentration risk, whether it is labelled as one or not. It’s a sector fund “light”, acquired by stealth through the natural mechanics of market-cap weighting. The issue is that millions of everyday investors are carrying a version of that same risk without necessarily knowing it.
Although I’ve used the S&P 500 as an example here, it isn’t alone. Most broad-based indexes including developed world trackers will exhibit the same characteristics to varying degrees, because the same companies sit near the top of those indexes too. The MSCI World, often marketed as the global diversifier, allocates somewhere in the region of seventy percent to US equities, and within that, the familiar names reappear. You can cross borders on paper without ever really leaving the room.
None of this is an argument against the S&P 500.
The concentration reflects real, earned dominance; these companies grew to the top of the index because they genuinely deserved to. And whether my reallocation turns out to be the right call is genuinely unknowable. The concentrated index could continue to outperform for another decade and I’ll have left returns on the table, a real possibility I’ve made my peace with. The point isn’t that I’ve found the correct answer. The point is that I had the information to make a considered choice, weighed it against my own circumstances, and acted accordingly. That’s all any investor can do.
The uncomfortable truth is that a great many people haven’t been given the chance to do the same. They’re holding a product that has quietly changed its character, and nobody has thought to mention it. Better information doesn’t guarantee better decisions, but it at least puts the decision where it belongs: with the person whose money it is.
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Mark Crothers is a retired small business owner from the UK with a keen interest in personal finance and simple living. Married to his high school sweetheart, with daughters and grandchildren, he knows the importance of building a secure financial future. With an aversion to social media, he prefers to spend his time on his main passions: reading, scratch cooking, racket sports, and hiking.
