What is look-through analysis?

Look-through analysis breaks every fund in a portfolio down into the securities it holds, and adds them up together with the portfolio's direct holdings. The result shows what the portfolio is really invested in — which companies, sectors, countries and currencies — rather than merely which funds.

A portfolio's list of holdings might read "three ETFs and five stocks". Looked through, it might turn out to hold 1,600 companies, a quarter of its money in ten of them, and a third in one sector.

How it works

For every underlying company $c$ , the exposure through all holdings $i$ is:

E_c = \sum_i \frac{V_i}{V_{\text{total}}} \times w_{i,c}

where $V_i$ is the value of holding $i$ and $w_{i,c}$ the weight of company $c$ inside it: its published weight for a fund, and 1 for a share held directly. The same sum grouped by sector, country or currency instead of by company gives the look-through sector, regional and currency allocations.

A simple illustration

Holding	Value	Weight of Company X inside	Exposure to Company X
World equity ETF	€30,000	4%	€1,200
Technology ETF	€10,000	12%	€1,200
Company X shares	€2,000	100%	€2,000
Total	€42,000		€4,400

E_X = \frac{4{,}400}{42{,}000} \approx 10.5\%

Counted directly, Company X is less than 5% of the portfolio. Looked through, it is more than 10%.

What it reveals

Hidden concentration in the largest companies, which appear in almost every broad fund.
ETF overlap: how much two funds hold in common.
The real sector and country split, which can differ strongly from what the names of the funds suggest.
Currency exposure based on where the underlying assets are, not on the currency a fund trades in.

Limits

Freshness of the data. Funds publish their holdings with a delay — daily for most ETFs, monthly or quarterly for many active funds — so the analysis shows the recent past.
Incomplete data. Some funds publish only their largest holdings, and the rest has to be estimated.
Derivatives. A synthetic ETF physically holds a basket of securities that can differ from its index; its economic exposure is the index, not the basket.

A worked example

Worked through on a sample portfolio. The figures below are that portfolio’s, not yours.

How much hidden concentration do I have?

Your look-through coverage is 26,84%. Because this is below 95%, the company-level breakdown and concentration figures reflect only the coverage currently available.

Here are the largest company exposures we can see from the look-through data:

Asset	Value (€)	Weight (%)
Apple Inc.	16.254,00 €	15,30%
Microsoft Corp.	10.596,25 €	9,98%
MasterCard Inc.	9.804,00 €	9,23%
Deutsche Lufthansa AG	7.678,00 €	7,23%
NVIDIA CORP	1.308,95 €	1,23%

A notable concentrated sleeve we can see is US mega-cap tech: 32.536,30 € (30,63% of the portfolio).

Largest fund overlap found: iShares Core MSCI World UCITS ETF and Xtrackers MSCI USA UCITS ETF 1C share 526 companies with a combined shared value of 16.171,68 €. A second smaller overlap is iShares Core MSCI World UCITS ETF vs iShares Core MSCI EM IMI UCITS ETF USD (Acc) sharing 3 companies (combined 51,78 €).

If you want more detail, I can show the full look-through list or expand coverage assumptions.

See these numbers for your own portfolio

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