The first three episodes read one fund at a time. VXUS for the world without America, the emerging-market funds for the part of it that grew fastest, VT for both halves in one ticker. Each answers where that fund's money sits. None answers where the money sits.
This one pools them. Every US-registered fund that files position-level N-PORT and passes the comparability test, one filing per fund per quarter, weighted by net assets on the filing date, counted by the issuer country each filer reported. At 2026 Q2 that is 962 funds, $16.04 trillion, and 56 countries.
The headline: 79.44 cents of every dollar is in a company filed as American.
Data: 28 quarters, 2019 Q3 to 2026 Q2 · definition ex-collateral-v2 · generated from the filings, re-measured as each new quarter's arrive · written 2026-09-27.
What the pool looks like now
| Country as filed | Share of $16.04tn |
|---|---|
| United States | 79.44% |
| Japan | 2.72% |
| United Kingdom | 1.72% |
| Canada | 1.56% |
| Taiwan | 1.48% |
| Korea | 1.24% |
| France | 1.01% |
| Switzerland | 0.95% |
| Germany | 0.93% |
| India | 0.74% |
| Hong Kong (as filed) | 0.72% |
| Ireland | 0.64% |
| China (as filed) | 0.48% |
| The other 43 countries | ~6.4% combined |
Four fifths in one country, and the next largest is a fortieth. That is not a claim about the world economy — it is a claim about where American fund investors' money is, which is a different and narrower thing, and the two are often confused.
Taiwan being the fifth-largest country in American fund portfolios, ahead of France, Switzerland and Germany, is the line most worth pausing on.
How it got here
The pool starts in 2019 Q3, but that quarter had only 222 funds on file against 962 now, so the early figures describe a different and much smaller sample. Comparisons in this essay start from 2020 Q3, by which point 700 funds had filed.
| Quarter | Funds | Net assets | US | Japan | UK | Taiwan | Korea |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 Q3 | 700 | $5.94tn | 75.64% | 3.48% | 2.10% | 0.87% | 0.70% |
| 2021 Q3 | 740 | $7.86tn | 77.34% | 3.04% | 1.95% | — | — |
| 2022 Q3 | 790 | $7.05tn | 78.23% | 2.93% | 2.00% | — | — |
| 2023 Q3 | 839 | $8.32tn | 78.70% | 2.96% | 1.91% | — | — |
| 2024 Q3 | 902 | $10.87tn | 80.93% | 2.80% | 1.75% | — | — |
| 2025 Q3 | 947 | $12.78tn | 80.61% | 2.60% | 1.76% | 0.93% | 0.54% |
| 2026 Q2 | 962 | $16.04tn | 79.44% | 2.72% | 1.72% | 1.48% | 1.24% |
Two things happen at once and they are easy to run together.
The pool tripled. $5.94 trillion to $16.04 trillion. Some of that is new funds filing — 700 to 962 — and most of it is the value of what was already there.
The American share rose about four points and has now turned. 75.64% in 2020 Q3, a peak of 80.93% in 2024 Q3, 79.44% now. The same shape VT's own filings show, at a different level because this pool includes US-only funds and VT does not.
Who gained and who gave way
Moves from 2020 Q3 to 2026 Q2, in percentage points of the whole pool:
| Gained | Gave way | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | +3.80 | Japan | −0.76 |
| Taiwan | +0.61 | Hong Kong | −0.56 |
| Korea | +0.54 | France | −0.46 |
| India | +0.17 | Germany | −0.46 |
| Ireland | +0.13 | United Kingdom | −0.38 |
| Israel | +0.08 | Switzerland | −0.31 |
Every developed European market on the list lost ground. Japan lost the most of any single country. Nothing in Europe gained. The winners outside the United States are three Asian markets and Israel.
And the Asian move is recent and fast:
| Quarter | Taiwan | Korea |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 Q3 | 0.93% | 0.54% |
| 2025 Q4 | 1.03% | 0.63% |
| 2026 Q1 | 1.25% | 0.92% |
| 2026 Q2 | 1.48% | 1.24% |
Taiwan up 59% and Korea up 130% as a share of all US fund money, in three quarters. Not three years. The same three quarters in which the American share fell from 80.61% to 79.44%.
A caution that matters here: a rising share in a pool this concentrated does not mean Americans bought more Taiwanese and Korean shares. It can equally mean those shares rose in price while the fund held the same number of them. These filings record weights, not flows, and nothing in N-PORT separates the two. Anyone telling you which it was is using a source that is not this one.
Where that exposure actually lives
A pooled share is an abstraction until you ask which funds hold it. For the two countries that moved most, the money is in very few places.
Taiwan — $237bn across 157 funds:
| Fund | Taiwan as % of the fund | $ held in Taiwan | Fund size |
|---|---|---|---|
| VXUS | 7.88% | $49.6bn | $629bn |
| VWO | 28.91% | $46.2bn | $160bn |
| IEMG | 25.78% | $41.8bn | $162bn |
| EWT | 96.60% | $10.4bn | $11bn |
| EMXC | 32.31% | $8.0bn | $25bn |
Korea — $199bn across 195 funds:
| Fund | Korea as % of the fund | $ held in Korea | Fund size |
|---|---|---|---|
| VXUS | 5.91% | $37.2bn | $629bn |
| IEMG | 22.07% | $35.8bn | $162bn |
| EWY | 99.95% | $24.1bn | $24bn |
| VEA | 7.15% | $22.6bn | $316bn |
| EMXC | 29.03% | $7.1bn | $25bn |
The top five funds carry 66% of all Taiwan exposure in the pool, and 64% of all Korea exposure. A hundred and fifty funds hold Taiwan; five of them are two thirds of it. If you own a broad international fund you already hold both of these countries, and probably more of them than a deliberate single-country position would give you.
One country is in two different buckets, and the pool adds them up
Look again at the Korea table. VEA is a developed-markets fund and holds Korea at 7.15%. IEMG is an emerging-markets fund and holds Korea at 22.07%. Both are right, and they disagree.
| Fund | Mandate | Korea | Taiwan |
|---|---|---|---|
| VEA (Vanguard, FTSE) | developed | 7.15% | not held |
| SCHF (Schwab, FTSE) | developed | 10.25% | not held |
| IEMG (iShares, MSCI) | emerging | 22.07% | 25.78% |
| VWO (Vanguard, FTSE) | emerging | not held | 28.91% |
| IEFA (iShares, MSCI) | developed | not held | not held |
FTSE classifies Korea as developed, so Vanguard and Schwab put it in their developed funds and leave it out of their emerging ones. MSCI classifies it as emerging, so iShares does the reverse. Taiwan is emerging for both, which is why it appears in VWO and IEMG and in neither developed fund.
This does not make the 1.24% wrong. A dollar in Samsung is a dollar in Samsung whichever drawer the index provider files it in, and this pool counts the issuer country, not the label. But it does mean that anyone building "developed plus emerging" from two fund families can hold Korea twice or not at all depending on which pair they pick — and that the phrase "emerging markets exposure" is not a well-defined quantity across providers. The country table is the more solid ground precisely because it ignores the labels.
What this measure is, exactly
Precision about the definition, because a country table invites over-reading more than most numbers do.
- "Country" is the issuer's country as the filer reported it (
invCountry), which is usually the country of incorporation. It is not where the revenue comes from, not where the shares are listed, and not where the employees are. A Cayman-incorporated Chinese operating company can be filed under either, and different sponsors file the same company differently — this site has found that directly comparing two funds on the same index. - Comparable funds only. Funds whose concentration measures are not comparable with plain long-only portfolios — leveraged, inverse, heavily derivative — are excluded, or their notional would swamp the arithmetic.
- Securities-lending collateral is removed before weights are computed (
ex-collateral-v2), so the cash a fund holds against lent stock does not read as an investment in whoever issued that cash fund. - One filing per fund per calendar quarter, weighted by that fund's net assets on its filing date. Funds file on different month-ends, so a quarter is a band of dates and not a single day.
XXis the unclassified code, 0.13% of the pool now against 0.53% in 2020 — filers have got better at populating the field, which is itself a small upward bias in every named country over time.
None of this makes the table wrong. It makes it a table about filings, which is what this site publishes.
What it cannot tell you
- It is not the world. It is what US-registered funds hold. Money managed elsewhere — and that is most of the world's money — is invisible here.
- It is not GDP, population or economic weight. The United States is 79% of this pool and nothing like 79% of anything else.
- It is not a flow. See above: weights move because prices move, and the filings do not separate that from buying.
- It is not advice, and nothing here suggests any country's share should be higher or lower.
- The fund count changed. 700 to 962 between the first comparison year and now. A country that only appears once the pool is large will look like it grew when it was simply not measured before.
The data
- The pooled series, every quarter and every country: /data/country_world.json
- A page per country, with the funds that carry it: /world/
- Per fund: /data/country-weights/TICKER.json
- Definitions and the dated log of definition changes: data dictionary
- Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, attribution to this page.
This closes the first season of World through ETFs. The series continues with a quarterly edition each time a new round of filings lands, starting from the movers table above and asking what moved and whether it was price or position.