Mutual Fund Overlap: How Much Do Your Funds Share?

What overlap means

Two funds overlap when they hold the same stocks. It matters because diversification comes from owning different things, not from owning different funds: three large cap funds that each put most of their money into the same thirty companies behave much like one fund with three expense ratios.

How it is measured

Overlap is read from the funds’ portfolios for the same month, in two ways:

• By count: how many stocks the funds have in common. Easy to read, but a stock held at 0.2% counts as much as one held at 9%.
• By weight: how much of each fund’s money sits in the shared stocks. This is the figure that matters. Two funds can share 40 names and yet have only a third of their money in them, or share 15 names that make up most of both.

The compare page shows both for two or three funds: the shared stocks, and for each fund the share of its own portfolio held in them. Another common measure adds up, stock by stock, the smaller of the two funds’ weights; it gives a single figure for the pair and is always the lower of the two.

To try it: the two largest flexi cap funds on this site, Parag Parikh Flexi Cap Fund and HDFC Flexi Cap Fund, or the two largest large cap funds here, ICICI Prudential Large Cap Fund and Nippon India Large Cap Fund.

Why large cap funds overlap so much

A large cap fund must keep at least 80% of its money in the 100 largest listed companies, and a handful of those dominate the index. Almost every equity fund owns them. In September 2026, of the 492 active equity funds that disclosed:

• ICICI Bank Limited was held by 275
• HDFC Bank Limited was held by 256
• Bharti Airtel Limited was held by 254
• Reliance Industries Limited was held by 228
• Eternal Limited was held by 225

So high overlap between two large cap funds is the norm, not a fault. It is more telling between funds that are meant to be different: a flexi cap and a large cap fund, two funds sold as having different styles, or a “focused” fund and a broad one.

When overlap matters, and when it does not

• It matters when you hold funds for different jobs and they turn out to hold the same things: the extra fund adds cost and paperwork, not diversification.
• It matters less when the shared stocks carry small weights in one of the funds, or when one fund is an index fund you hold on purpose as a core.
• It changes. Portfolios move every month, so overlap is a reading for one month. Check it again from time to time, especially after a change of fund manager.

My funds goes one step further: list the funds you own and it adds up what you hold underneath, company by company, so you can see your real exposure to each stock across all of them.

Overlap says nothing about which fund is better; it only says how alike they are. The concentration guide covers the related question of how much each fund leans on its largest holdings.