Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street in Q4 2025: The Overlap Map That Defines the Passive Baseline

Marcus Chen

Three giant 13F filings point to the same conclusion: market leadership is so concentrated that the overlap between passive giants has become the baseline every active manager must be measured against.

If you want to know what the market's default equity portfolio looked like in Q4 2025, read Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street together. The overlap between the three is not noise. It is the passive baseline.

Across all three filings, NVIDIA (NVDA), Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), and Alphabet remained the common core. The exact weights differed, but not enough to change the conclusion: if an active manager wants to look genuinely different, it has to differentiate from this spine.

TL;DR

  • Shared top three: NVDA, AAPL, and MSFT led all three portfolios.
  • Common pattern: All three posted huge jumps in Netflix and ServiceNow exposure.
  • Interpretation: Overlap is the passive baseline, not independent idea confirmation.
  • Best use: Compare active managers against this trio to see what is actually differentiated.

What The Overlap Says

These are different organizations with different product mixes, but the same market structure keeps pulling them toward the same names. That is what happens when benchmark-heavy capital meets extreme mega-cap leadership. The overlap tells you what a broad, index-linked book had to own.

Top Holding Weights Across Passive Giants - Q4 2025

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The more useful question is not “Why do they all own NVIDIA?” The answer is obvious. The useful question is which names show up in one or two books but not all three, and which quarter-to-quarter changes spread across the trio simultaneously.

Why This Matters For Stock Pickers

The passive baseline is now so concentrated that many active portfolios can look differentiated on marketing slides while still hugging the same mega-cap spine in practice. Measuring an active manager against this overlap map is a faster way to see whether they are truly making a choice or just inheriting the market's default exposure.

Q&A

Does overlap mean the three firms all agree on the same thesis?

No. It more often means benchmark design and market concentration forced the same names to the top.

What should readers compare against this overlap map?

Compare concentrated or selective filers like FMR and your own watchlist names to see what really deviates from the passive core.

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