Is your portfolio actually diversified?
Ten stocks in one theme isn't ten bets. It's one, in ten costumes.
Start the quiz →What this quiz explores
Most people count holdings and call it diversification. The question that matters is whether your positions can fail independently, and for a lot of portfolios the answer is no. This quiz maps you against the kind of concentration you have.
How it works
The quiz has 4 possible results. Each answer option was written to lean toward one of them.
Your result is the one your answers pointed to most often. Skipped questions, and the occasional answer that does not lean toward any result, are not counted.
Alongside the result you see your answer profile: the share of your answers that pointed to each result. Close percentages mean you sit between two results, which is common.
Four kinds of concentration
The Costume Collection
You own a lot of things and you're making one bet, and you probably knew that before you started this.
Fifteen positions, all chosen deliberately, all pointed the same way. The theme might be technology, or growth, or energy, or whatever you spent a year reading about, and the individual picks are defensible. What isn't defensible is calling it diversification. On a bad day everything you own is red by roughly the same amount, which is the clearest evidence you have one position rather than fifteen. The trap is that theme concentration feels like expertise, and often it began as expertise. The cost arrives when the theme goes out of favor, which historically happens for years rather than weeks, and the version of you that has to sit through that is the one who chose the positions during the good stretch. That asymmetry is what turns a good thesis into a bad decade. You don't need to abandon the conviction. Size it. Decide what percentage of your total net worth belongs to the theme, and trim to that line on a schedule rather than a feeling, since a schedule removes the timing question that keeps people frozen. Then put the proceeds somewhere structurally different: another region, another asset class, something with no reason to move when your theme does.
Overlap Stack
You bought six funds on six different days and you own the same hundred companies six times.
Every fund in your account was a reasonable purchase at the moment you made it. Read something persuasive, add a fund. What never happened was the step where you check what the new one holds against what you already owned, so the portfolio looks diversified on the summary page and contains a great deal of the same thing underneath. A total market fund, an S&P fund, a large-cap growth fund and a technology fund are, in practice, substantially one holding. The trap is that overlap is invisible from the account screen. You'd need to open the holdings list of each fund and compare them, which nobody does unprompted, and the result is a portfolio with more fees, more complexity, and less protection than a simpler version would provide. Complexity here is costing you rather than buying you anything. Spend one afternoon on the top ten holdings of every fund you own, side by side. The duplicates will be obvious. Then simplify hard: a small number of broad funds covering different ground usually beats what you have now on cost and on behavior, because a portfolio you can hold in your head is one you'll keep maintaining. Mind the tax consequences in a taxable account and consolidate over time rather than in one day.
Broadly Held
Your portfolio is doing what it says on the tin, so your risks have moved somewhere else.
An allocation decided once, across asset classes and regions, checked for overlap, rebalanced on a schedule. Parts of it hold up when other parts fall. You're in the minority of readers here and the honest answer is that the portfolio itself isn't your problem.
The Two-Asset Life
Your net worth is a house and a paycheck, and no amount of portfolio tinkering addresses either.
There isn't much inside the investment account to diversify, because the account isn't where your money is. It's in home equity, in a savings balance, and above all in your ability to keep earning. This is the normal shape for a large share of people in their thirties and forties, particularly in expensive cities, and it's not a mistake so much as a stage. The trap is that the risks here are correlated in a way that only shows up in a bad year. A regional downturn can hit your employer, your home value, and your ability to sell it, all within the same twelve months, and the buffer between those events is cash rather than any clever allocation. The other cost is opportunity: a large share of your net worth is in an asset that houses you and grows slowly, while the decades you have left favor things that compound. Start with the buffer, since it's the thing that prevents a forced sale at the worst moment: enough liquid savings to cover several months of your real expenses, held separately. After that, the highest-leverage move is boring, which is a monthly automatic contribution into one broad, cheap fund. You're not behind on diversification. You're early, and early is the part that compounds.
Nothing here is individualized advice.
What this quiz can’t tell you
- It does not know your income, debts, taxes, dependents or goals, and any real decision turns on those.
- It sorts you by how you answered a set of general questions. It is not a financial plan and it is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything.
- Markets and personal circumstances change. A result that fits today may not fit next year.
How this quiz was designed
Built around correlation rather than count.
Read more about how our quizzes are created, including how scoring works and what we do and do not claim.