VOO

VOO owns the 500 largest US companies, costs 0.03% a year — three dollars annually on ten thousand invested — and has grown to roughly a trillion dollars in assets. Over the past ten years it's returned about 15.6% annually, which is an exceptional stretch by any historical standard. For most people, this fund or something like it is the correct answer to "where should I put my money," and nothing in the rest of this piece should be read as arguing otherwise. It's the default for good reason. But it's worth knowing what you actually own now, because it's changed. The S&P 500 weights companies by size, so as the biggest companies got enormous, the fund got top-heavy. NVIDIA alone is around 7–8% of the fund. Apple is about 7%, Microsoft around 5%. Those three are roughly 19% of every dollar you put in. The top ten holdings are about 36–38%, and technology is roughly a third of the fund. A decade ago those numbers were much lower. So when people say the S&P 500 is a diversified index of American business — true, but less true than it used to be. A meaningful chunk of it is now a bet on a handful of companies, and several of those companies are betting on the same AI buildout. That's the reason we hold it alongside gold and international rather than by itself. If you own VOO plus a handful of AI infrastructure names, the overlap is larger than it feels: NVIDIA and Amazon are already in there, sitting at the top. That doesn't make VOO a bad holding. It makes it a holding you should count honestly when you're adding up your exposure. Two practical notes for anyone comparing options: VOO and IVV both charge 0.03% for the same index while SPY charges 0.0945%, so there's no reason to pay more for identical exposure. And the market is at record highs with the index trading around 28 times earnings, which is expensive by historical standards. That's not a reason to avoid it — nobody times this well — but it's a reason to expect the next decade to look less like the last one. (written with the help of Claude)