--- title: "Bank earnings week will miss most of what a financials fund owns" url: "https://etf.net/news/bank-earnings-week-will-miss-most-of-what-a-financials-fund-owns-2026-10-12" published_at: "2026-10-12T14:43:30.270Z" updated_at: "2026-10-12T14:43:30.270Z" byline: "ETF.net Research" --- # Bank earnings week will miss most of what a financials fund owns The six biggest US banks report this week, but they are 28.5% of the largest financials fund, whose shares are flat for the year while the S&P 500 is up 14%. By ETF.net Research. Published Oct 12, 2026. The six biggest American banks open their books this week, and the largest fund investors use for financials will only partly be listening. JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Citigroup report on Tuesday, and Bank of America and Morgan Stanley on Wednesday, CNBC reported on Sunday, October 11. Those six were **28.5%** of the State Street Financial Select Sector SPDR ETF, XLF, in its latest holdings. Berkshire Hathaway, which is not reporting earnings this week, was a bigger single position than any of them. The label covers banks, insurers, card networks, brokers and asset managers, and the funds sold under it do not agree on the mix. This week's numbers will describe the lenders. They will not describe the fund. ## The same word, four portfolios XLF holds 76 companies, every one of them drawn from the financial sector of the S&P 500, and it charges 0.08% a year. It is the fund the category is measured against: about $50.4 billion in assets, with close to $1.9 billion of shares changing hands on an average day. Its ten largest positions were 57.5% of the fund. Four names, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan, Visa and Mastercard, were 38.4% by themselves. Chart: Berkshire, JPMorgan, Visa and Mastercard lead **XLF** The Vanguard Financials ETF, VFH, starts from a wider list. It tracks the MSCI US Investable Market Financials index, which runs from large companies down to small ones, and it held 404 names in the same snapshot. Its biggest position, JPMorgan, was 10.4%. It charges 0.09% and holds about $14.8 billion. Nearly every company in XLF also sits in VFH, and the two portfolios overlap by 86% on a weight basis. The largest positions are not the same size in each fund: Berkshire Hathaway was 12.5% of XLF and 7.8% of VFH, and Visa was 8.4% of XLF and 4.3% of VFH. What Vanguard adds is a long list of smaller companies that XLF does not hold. The Fidelity MSCI Financials Index ETF, FNCL, is built on the same idea, with 404 holdings, a 0.08% fee and about $2.2 billion in assets. Its largest position was also JPMorgan, at 10.3%. The iShares U.S. Financials ETF, IYF, is the one that breaks the pattern. It tracks the Russell 1000 Financials 40 Act 15/22.5 Daily Capped Index, a FTSE Russell index of large US companies, and holds 143 of them. It charges 0.37%, more than four times the 0.08% on XLF, and runs about $3.8 billion. Berkshire Hathaway was 12.0% of it and JPMorgan 11.1%. Visa and Mastercard, the third and fourth holdings of XLF, do not appear among its largest positions. The reason is a classification choice, not a view on the businesses. IYF's index includes only companies that FTSE Russell, the firm behind the Russell indexes, assigns to its Financials industry. Under FTSE Russell's Industry Classification Benchmark, card networks sit in industrials, as providers of transaction processing services, a category whose definition covers card network operators. FTSE Russell's own notice on that category cited Visa and Mastercard as examples. The S&P 500's classification goes the other way. Visa and Mastercard moved out of technology and into financials in the Global Industry Classification Standard reclassification of March 2023, Nasdaq noted at the time, which is why a fund tracking the S&P 500's financial sector holds them in size. In the other large cap-weighted funds, those six banks were a similar share: 26.1% of VFH, 25.5% of FNCL and 29.6% of IYF, against 28.5% of XLF. ## Two funds that refuse to pick a winner The funds above let company size set the weights, so a handful of names dominate. Two smaller funds weight their holdings close to equally. The Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight Financials ETF, RSPF, owns the financial companies in the S&P 500 and gives each roughly the same weight, rebalancing every quarter. Its largest holding was PayPal, at 1.5%, and its ten largest were 14.3% of the fund. It charges 0.40% and holds $383 million, a fraction of its cap-weighted cousin. The First Trust Financials AlphaDEX Fund, FXO, goes a step further. Its index screens financial companies from the Russell 1000, FTSE Russell's large-company index, using First Trust's AlphaDEX method, which the fund says is meant to find stocks that may beat a plain cap-weighted index, and it weights the results close to equally. Chime Financial, a digital bank, was its largest holding at 1.8%, and the top ten were 17.1%. The fee is 0.60%, and the fund holds about $1.0 billion. Table: Fund, Holdings, Largest position, Annual fee, Assets The same sector label produces a fund that is more than half ten companies and a fund whose largest holding is a digital bank at under 2%. Weights are each fund's latest reported holdings. ## A flat year beside a rising market None of this construction debate shows up in the results, which have been remarkably alike. From the last close of 2025 through Friday, October 9, XLF's share price was down 0.1%. VFH, FNCL and IYF also finished within 1% of where they started. The equal-weight fund gained 0.6%. The screened fund gained 2.5%, the best of the group, which is a result and not a verdict on its method. Chart: Financials ETFs clustered near **zero** as SPY rose The State Street SPDR S&P 500 ETF, SPY, rose **14.2%** over the same stretch. All of these are share-price changes, so they leave out dividends, but the dividends do not rescue the year. State Street's own total return for XLF, which counts them, was down 1.35% through Wednesday, September 30. Over three years the difference narrows without disappearing: XLF returned 18.99% a year, annualized, against 22.73% for SPY, both through that date and both counting dividends. ## The reports cover a slice The investment banks are a small slice of XLF. US companies raised $355.1 billion in equity through September, up 96.1% from a year earlier, SIFMA reported on Friday, October 2. That is their business. Goldman Sachs was 3.4% of XLF and Morgan Stanley 2.9%. A bank-only fund makes credit results the whole portfolio, and a regional-bank fund is not where this week's six banks sit. The State Street SPDR S&P Regional Banking ETF, KRE, holds 167 regional banks, charges 0.35% and runs about $3.3 billion. Its largest position, East West Bancorp, was 1.1% of it. One quarter's loan losses or deposit costs would be the story of that fund. In XLF they would be one input among several. Source: etf.net, https://etf.net/news/bank-earnings-week-will-miss-most-of-what-a-financials-fund-owns-2026-10-12. Please cite the page URL.