Originally published in Svenska Dagbladet by Björn Jeffery, November 19, 2025

With markets tense and nervous, Nvidia — the heart of the AI economy — reports its quarterly results on Wednesday evening. But is it even possible to avoid Nvidia in your portfolio if you want to? SvD’s tech analyst Björn Jeffery decided to put it to the test.

If there is anyone who has made a name for themselves with simple, sober advice about the stock market, it is the legendary investor Warren Buffett. In his annual letter to the shareholders of his company Berkshire Hathaway in 2013, he wrote the following about how he would like a future inheritance from him to be managed:

“Put 10 percent of the money in short-term government bonds and 90 percent in a low-cost index fund tracking the S&P 500.”

The advice has not aged quite as intended. Today, around 8 percent of such a fund consists of Nvidia. More than a third is tech companies overall.

With markets now buzzing with anxiety ahead of the chip company’s report on Wednesday evening, I grew curious. How do you put together a broad stock market portfolio that does not contain Nvidia?

I decided to run an experiment and test it. It turned out to be harder than I had expected.

Let me start with the obvious: of course it is possible to trade around Nvidia. If you only buy Swedish equities, your exposure to Nvidia is essentially zero. The same if you buy property bonds or similar instruments.

But most Swedish private investors do not invest in securities that way. They want to buy funds, and preferably ones as broadly diversified as possible to avoid excessive concentration in any one sector. This is what I tried to replicate in the experiment.

So what happens if you simply buy broad global index funds? You end up with something considerably more concentrated than you might expect. In particular, global funds, US funds, and tech funds have all begun to look very similar to one another.

I looked at Länsförsäkringar Global Index, a popular Swedish global fund. The fund tracks a particular index and therefore does not pick its own stocks. This explains why the global component of this global fund has shrunk considerably.

Today it consists of more than 75 percent US equities. The single largest holding is, once again, Nvidia. Among the ten largest holdings, nine are American tech companies.

If you compare Länsförsäkringar Global Index with its sibling fund Länsförsäkringar USA Index, you find quite a few similarities, to say the least. The ten largest holdings are identical.

The pattern is similar at other global funds too.

Another popular fund, Handelsbanken Global Index, tracks a different index than Länsförsäkringar. But the contents are familiar. Eight of the ten largest holdings are tech. Nvidia is the largest at 5.9 percent of the fund. And this global fund too consists of more than 62 percent US equities. China is the second largest, at around 5.7 percent.

I went broader still. Surely there must be entirely different kinds of indices that distribute stocks more globally?

Here I found ACWI — the All World Country Index — which nonetheless suffered from something similar. The US accounts for around 65 percent of the holdings, and all of the ten largest are in tech. Topping the list again: Nvidia, with just over 5 percent.

Global funds were therefore no solution to my problem. But what about entirely different markets?

Even there I found pitfalls. Länsförsäkringar Tillväxtmarknad Index does not, admittedly, have Nvidia among its holdings. But the largest holding is TSMC — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company — also known as the world’s largest chip manufacturer. TSMC is the company that produces the majority of Nvidia’s chips. Second and third among the holdings are the Chinese tech giants Tencent and Alibaba — both very active in the AI market.

To avoid Nvidia while still maintaining broad exposure, I had to hunt considerably further down the fund list. The exchange-traded fund “Amundi MSCI USA ex Mega Cap” is an attempt at precisely this — it removes the very largest companies (“mega cap”) entirely.

But there a different problem arose: performance.

So far this year, that fund has fallen half a percent. Had I bought it at the start of the year, I would have successfully avoided Nvidia — but I would also have lost money.

The explanation for this dismal performance is the same reason Nvidia is so overrepresented in so many other funds.

In a stock index, specifically prescribed rules determine which companies are included and which are not, and also the frequency with which the index is rebalanced. When a stock performs well over a period, it gets a larger share of the index. And Nvidia has performed extraordinarily well — rising more than 1,350 percent over the past five years. Together with other tech giants like Apple and Microsoft, that success has meant they have slowly become an ever-larger part of these indices. Remove these stocks entirely and you have also missed their entire rise.

Economists tend to talk about the importance of diversification — not putting all your eggs in one basket. The tricky part is that what was a fairly diversified portfolio a few years ago has now become considerably more concentrated. If you bought a blend of global, emerging market, and US funds ten years ago, you might well be surprised how often Nvidia now shows up — directly and indirectly.

Even for someone like me — relatively informed and purposeful — attempting to build a broad fund portfolio without Nvidia was neither easy, clear-cut, nor particularly successful. Sure, it is possible. But it is unfortunately not as simple as it sounds. I am now left holding financial products with names along the lines of “iShares Inflation Linked Govt Bond UCITS ETF EUR (Acc)”. You would not find that in the average person’s portfolio.

Have you made no active choices about your savings at all? With your money in a savings account, Wednesday’s quarterly figures from Nvidia can pass you by without worry. But if you have not made any particular choices about your pension either, I have bad news.

The single largest holding in AP7 Såfa — the so-called “sofa fund”, which you are allocated when you have not chosen anything yourself — is, of course, Nvidia.