VOO vs QQQ vs SCHD: Overlap, Returns and Which to Own

VOO is the core: the whole S&P 500 for 0.03% a year. QQQ (0.18%) is a 100-stock growth bet that won the last ten years, 20.8% a year against VOO's 15.4%, but it fell 83% in 2000–02 and 35% in 2022. SCHD (0.06%) is a dividend-quality fund that yields about 3.4% and returned 12.7% a year over the same decade. If you want one fund, it's VOO. Adding QQQ on top mostly buys more of the same tech giants you already own.

Held together, VOO and QQQ overlap heavily, while SCHD barely overlaps with either at the top, so adding SCHD changes what you own far more than adding QQQ does.

VOO, QQQ and SCHD at a glance

	VOO	QQQ	SCHD
Index	S&P 500	Nasdaq-100	Dow Jones U.S. Dividend 100
What's in it	~500 large US companies	100 largest non-financial Nasdaq companies	100 dividend payers screened for quality
Expense ratio	0.03%	0.18%	0.06%
Yield	low	low	3.37% (30-day SEC, 1 Oct 2026)
Top 10 holdings	36.3% of the fund	46.3%	41.6%
Technology sector	38.6%	58.0%	12.7%

Fees from the VOO fact sheet, Invesco's QQQ page and Schwab's SCHD page, checked on 5 October 2026. Holdings and sector weights as of 25 August 2026.

QQQ got a little cheaper recently. It used to cost 0.20%, and when shareholders approved turning it from a unit investment trust into a regular open-end ETF in December 2025, the fee dropped to 0.18%. Still six times VOO's.

SCHD's index starts with US companies that have paid dividends for at least ten years in a row, keeps the ones with an above-median yield, then ranks them on free cash flow to debt, return on equity, yield and five-year dividend growth, and keeps the top 100. The list gets rebuilt once a year. That's why its top holdings read like a supermarket and a pharmacy: Abbott, Amgen, Merck, Coca-Cola, UnitedHealth, Home Depot, Procter & Gamble, Chevron, Verizon, PepsiCo.

How much do VOO, QQQ and SCHD overlap?

Running the three pairs through the method MFFT's ETF overlap calculator uses gives two numbers per pair. Top-holdings overlap adds up the smaller weight of every stock that appears in both funds' disclosed top-10 lists. Sector overlap does the same across all sectors.

Pair	Top-holdings overlap	Sector overlap	Shared top-10 names
VOO vs QQQ	34.5%	73.2%	Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Broadcom, Micron, Meta
VOO vs SCHD	0%	60.4%	none
QQQ vs SCHD	0%	41.3%	none

Both top-holdings numbers are floors: fund data feeds only disclose the biggest positions, and those cover 36% of VOO and 46% of QQQ. The real VOO/QQQ overlap is higher than 34.5%, because many Nasdaq-100 companies outside the top 10 are S&P 500 members too. The 0% for SCHD understates it too: SCHD's names are large US companies that VOO holds, just at a fraction of the weight, so the duplication is small rather than zero.

Eight of the nine companies in VOO's top 10 (Alphabet has two share classes) are also in QQQ's top 10, so if you hold both, your second fund is mostly a bigger bet on the same eight companies.

You can check any mix of tickers in the free portfolio analysis tool, no sign-up. It shows which stocks sit in more than one of your funds and what your combined weight in each one is.

What a VOO + QQQ + SCHD portfolio actually owns

Here's the look-through, using the same holdings data and simple weighted averages:

Portfolio	Tech sector	Health care	Consumer staples	Energy	Nvidia	Apple	Blended fee
100% VOO	38.6%	8.9%	4.5%	3.0%	7.5%	6.6%	0.030%
50% VOO + 50% QQQ	48.3%	6.3%	5.6%	1.8%	7.8%	7.0%	0.105%
50% VOO + 50% SCHD	25.7%	15.0%	12.2%	9.0%	3.8%	3.3%	0.045%
One-third each	36.4%	11.3%	10.4%	6.2%	5.2%	4.7%	0.090%

Data: MFFT ETF overlap data, sector weights as of 25 August 2026. Mixes are weighted averages of the fund sector weights.

In an equal three-way split, QQQ's extra tech and SCHD's small tech weight basically cancel: 36.4% tech against VOO's 38.6%. What you end up with is VOO with less weight in financials (7.2% instead of 11.4%), more health care, staples and energy, and three times the fee.

The 50/50 VOO and QQQ mix goes the other way: 48.3% of the money sits in one sector, with the same top names as before, only slightly bigger (Nvidia 7.8% instead of 7.5%, Apple 7.0% instead of 6.6%).

Ten years of returns

Total returns with dividends reinvested, from MFFT's what-if-I-invested data, August 2016 to August 2026:

	VOO	QQQ	SCHD	One-third each, rebalanced yearly
$1,000 became	$4,177	$6,618	$3,306	$4,589
Per year	15.4%	20.8%	12.7%	16.5%
2022	−18.2%	−32.6%	−3.3%
2023	+26.3%	+54.9%	+4.5%
2024	+25.0%	+25.6%	+11.7%
2025	+17.8%	+20.8%	+4.3%
2026 to 7 Aug	+13.7%	+17.5%	+24.4%

Data: MFFT what-if-I-invested data, month-end total-return closes, 8 August 2016 to 7 August 2026.

QQQ won the decade: $1,000 became $6,618, against $4,177 in VOO. SCHD lost only 3.3% in 2022, when QQQ lost a third, and then trailed for three straight years (4.5%, 11.7%, 4.3%) while tech ran away. In 2026 to 7 August it leads, up 24.4% against 17.5% for QQQ. The one-third mix, rebalanced yearly, finished at $4,589, ahead of VOO and behind QQQ.

The falls are the price of QQQ's returns

MFFT's drawdown history data shows how deep and how long the falls were. VOO isn't in that dataset, so SPY, which tracks the same S&P 500 index, stands in for it.

	Worst fall	Took until	2022 fall	2020 fall
S&P 500 (SPY)	−55.2% (2007–09)	Aug 2012 to recover	−24.5%	−33.7%
QQQ	−83.0% (2000–02)	Feb 2015 to recover	−35.1%	−28.6%
SCHD	−33.4% (2020)	Sep 2020 to recover	−16.8%	−33.4%

Someone who bought QQQ at the March 2000 peak waited almost 15 years to get back to even, with dividends reinvested. SCHD only exists since 2011, so it never lived through 2000 or 2008, and its quality filter has never been tested in a long tech crash. In the fast 2020 crash it fell 33.4%, as hard as the S&P 500's 33.7%.

For VOO vs QQQ long term, QQQ's higher return comes with longer and deeper holes: an 83% fall with recovery in February 2015, against 55.2% and recovery by August 2012 for the S&P 500. If you'd keep buying through a 35% drop, and through a decade-long one, the concentration might pay.

SCHD vs VOO: is the dividend worth it?

SCHD's 3.4% yield comes out of the fund's price: when a fund pays a dividend, its price drops by about that amount, so the number that counts is total return, price change plus dividends. On that measure VOO beat SCHD by 2.7 percentage points a year over the last ten years.

Where SCHD earns its place is behaviour and mix. It held up far better in 2022, and it leans into health care, staples and energy, the sectors VOO is light on. If you're living off the portfolio and like the idea of spending dividends rather than selling shares, that has real psychological value. Just check how dividends are taxed where you live before you decide, because in many countries a payout is taxed every year while unrealised growth isn't. If income is the goal, there's a separate piece on living off monthly dividends.

QQQ vs QQQM, and where VTI fits

QQQM holds the same Nasdaq-100 index as QQQ for 0.15% instead of 0.18%. QQQ is one of the most traded ETFs in the US, which matters to traders and option sellers. For someone buying monthly and holding for decades, QQQM is the cheaper wrapper for the identical portfolio.

VTI adds mid and small US companies to what VOO holds, and the same giants dominate both, so "VOO vs QQQ vs VTI" is really a two-way choice: broad US market or Nasdaq-100. VOO vs VTI has its own write-up, and the choice between those two barely matters.

Which one should you own?

• One fund, done: VOO. Cheapest, broadest of the three, and you still hold every tech giant at a large weight.
• You want more growth and can stomach a 35% year: VOO plus a small QQQ slice. Size it as a concentration bet on the same eight names.
• You want the portfolio to lean less on tech: VOO plus SCHD does that more than any other combination here. It also cost you return over the past decade.
• All three: fine, but understand it lands close to VOO with a sector tilt toward defensive stocks, at three times the cost.

None of the three goes outside the US, and a world fund is still concentrated in US tech giants too. If that matters to you, read why home bias is a real choice and how a single S&P 500 fund can be less diversified than it looks. And if you're in the EU, your broker probably won't sell you these US-listed ETFs at all; UCITS funds track the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100, and the best world ETFs cover the rest.

Before you buy a second or third fund, check whether the top five stocks of your combined portfolio are the same five as VOO alone; if they are, the extra fund isn't doing what you bought it for. I built MFFT; its tool only shows the top disclosed holdings of each fund, not every last position. To run the check, put your planned mix into the portfolio analysis tool.