What Happened to Morningstar's Instant X-Ray — and What a Portfolio X-Ray Shows
A portfolio X-Ray looks through every fund you own to the companies underneath and adds up duplicate exposures. Here's exactly what Morningstar retired in 2025 and what still costs $249 a year, what the report contains, and a worked example computed from real holdings.
A portfolio X-Ray is a look-through report: it explodes every fund you hold into the companies inside it, weights each company by how much of your money sits in that fund, and adds up every route to the same company. The output is the portfolio you actually own, which is rarely the one on your brokerage statement.
What happened to Morningstar's Instant X-Ray?
Not all of it, and the part that went away is narrower than the phrase "Morningstar retired X-Ray" suggests. The free standalone Instant X-Ray was retired for Morningstar's Europe, Canada and Asia sites in April 2025. The old free tool no longer works in the US either — its address now leads to the paid product — though no notice covers that. X-Ray itself continues inside Morningstar Investor, a paid subscription priced at $249 a year in the US as of August 2026.
The documented half is a dated fact. In a notice published April 15, 2025 — Upcoming changes to our membership offerings, tools, and features — the company said it had "made the decision to discontinue our paid Premium membership tier alongside select tools and features associated with both Premium and current free memberships," effective April 17, 2025, and listed the retirements. Two of them were "X-Ray and Instant X-Ray" and "Portfolio Manager (for both Premium and free members)." The notice describes changes to Morningstar's media sites for Europe, Canada and Asia.
The undocumented half is what a US reader runs into: the free tool's old address no longer produces a working X-Ray, it lands on the Morningstar Investor sales page instead, and Morningstar published no notice about that. Morningstar Investor's own portfolio-tools page markets X-Ray in the present tense — "X-Ray lays out your overall asset allocation, sector weightings, fees, and more" — alongside Stock Intersection, at $249 yearly or $34.95 monthly. So the capability is alive and sold; what closed is the free front door.
That is the whole of the competitor question, and it explains the search traffic this page sits on. What it doesn't explain is what the report was for. The rest of this article is about the measurement — what a look-through report contains, how each number is derived, and where it stops being reliable. It isn't a comparison of tools.
What does a look-through report actually show?
Four things, and only the first is available from a holdings list:
- Your positions and their weights — the line items you typed in.
- Every underlying company, with its effective weight — each stock's weight inside a fund, multiplied by that fund's weight in your portfolio, summed across every fund and any direct position in the same company.
- Concentration measures computed on that looked-through list — effective number of holdings, the share of your money in the ten largest underlying companies, the dominant sector.
- How much of the portfolio could be seen through at all — the coverage ratio, without which the other three are unfalsifiable.
Take a portfolio that looks unremarkable on a statement. Four funds and one stock:
| Position | Weight | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| VOO | 40.0% | S&P 500 index fund |
| VUG | 20.0% | US large-cap growth |
| VXUS | 15.0% | Total international stock |
| AAPL | 15.0% | Direct holding |
| VGT | 10.0% | US information technology |
Five line items. One of them is a single stock at 15%, which is the only concentration a holdings list can show you.
What does the look-through find that a holdings list doesn't?
Run the same portfolio through the exposures underneath and it holds 2,716 distinct companies, of which these are the ten largest. Figures computed from full issuer-published constituent lists, holdings as of June 30, 2026, and documented in our methodology.
| Company | Effective weight | In how many of your funds | Held directly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple | 21.4% | 3 | Yes |
| NVIDIA | 7.1% | 3 | No |
| Microsoft | 4.1% | 3 | No |
| Alphabet (GOOGL) | 2.5% | 2 | No |
| Broadcom | 2.4% | 3 | No |
| Amazon | 2.3% | 2 | No |
| Alphabet (GOOG) | 1.9% | 2 | No |
| Advanced Micro Devices | 1.5% | 3 | No |
| Meta | 1.5% | 2 | No |
| Tesla | 1.4% | 2 | No |
The Apple position is 21.4% of the portfolio, not 15%. The extra 6.4 points arrive through three funds nobody bought for Apple exposure. NVIDIA is 7.1% of the portfolio without a single share bought deliberately. Every one of the top ten arrives by more than one route.
Widen it past the top ten and the pattern is the portfolio's dominant feature: 238 companies are reached by more than one position, and those companies hold 70.6% of the money. Credit each company only to its single largest route and 31.2% of the portfolio is still left over — that residue is the duplicated share, the money invested twice in the same names.
How is an effective weight calculated?
Multiply, then add. A company's effective weight is the fund's weight in your portfolio times the company's weight inside the fund, summed over every position that holds it. For Apple:
| Route | Fund's weight in portfolio | Apple's weight in the fund | Effective weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Held directly | — | — | 15.00% |
| Via VOO | 40.0% | 6.59% | 2.64% |
| Via VUG | 20.0% | 11.64% | 2.33% |
| Via VGT | 10.0% | 14.33% | 1.43% |
| Total | 21.40% |
Nothing here is modeled or estimated. It's the issuer's own published weights and your own position sizes, and you can check any row of it against the fund's holdings file.
The reason a single-pair check won't produce this number is that duplication stacks in threes and fours. The pairwise overlap between VOO and VUG is 57.5% by weight, which reads as a lot of common ground and nothing worse. It's the third fund and the direct share position, landing on the same names, that take Apple from 6.59% inside an index fund to 21.4% of a portfolio.
Why does effective holdings matter more than the number of positions?
Because a count treats a 0.01% position and a 21% position as one thing each. Effective holdings — the inverse Herfindahl index, 1 / Σw², computed over the looked-through companies — weights each position by its size, so a portfolio of one 50% and two 25% positions scores ~2.7 rather than 3.
This portfolio holds 2,716 companies and behaves like 17.7 equally weighted ones. That gap is the whole point of the measure. The 2,716 is real, and almost all of it sits in a tail so thin that it barely moves the arithmetic; the top ten alone are 46.0% of the money.
PortLens marks a company reaching 10% of a portfolio, and the top ten reaching 60%. This portfolio crosses the first and not the second. Those cutoffs are transparent design choices — the 10% one borrows a regulatory reference point from the UCITS Directive that governs funds rather than personal portfolios — and crossing one changes visual emphasis, nothing else. It isn't a risk grade or a signal to trade. All investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal, and past performance does not guarantee future results.
What does a look-through report not show?
The measure is precise about a narrow question, and its edges matter more than usual because the output looks so authoritative.
- It is bounded by constituent coverage. PortLens constituent data covers the top ~50 holdings per ETF from our data provider, supplemented by curated mappings for major funds, and every scan reports a coverage ratio. Below roughly 75% coverage, the concentration figures understate reality rather than overstate it.
- Even full issuer files have a tail. All four funds above carry issuer-published lists rather than a top-50 sample, and none of them reaches 100%: VOO's weights sum to 99.0%, VUG's to 99.7%, VGT's to 99.5% — and VXUS's, across 2,071 lines, to 85.0%. The missing 15% of that fund doesn't appear in any look-through.
- International funds are the weak spot, which is the same point stated as a rule. Look-through is strongest for US large-cap funds; a fund that can't be resolved contributes nothing at all, and its weight shows up in the coverage ratio rather than in your top ten.
- It's a snapshot. These holdings are as of June 30, 2026. Index reconstitutions and drift move every figure above.
- It says nothing about returns. Overlap and concentration are holdings measures. Whether two positions move together is a different question, estimated from returns over a stated window. Low overlap implies nothing at all about correlation.
- It doesn't know what you meant to build. A 21.4% position is a fact about the portfolio, not a verdict on it. Someone who bought Apple deliberately and then bought a technology fund got exactly what both purchases contain.
How do you run a portfolio X-Ray for free?
Type your holdings in. A free PortLens scan computes the whole report — effective weights per company, how many of your funds each one arrives through, effective holdings, top-ten concentration and the coverage ratio — with no account required to start.
The entry is manual, and that's worth saying plainly: PortLens does not connect to a broker and has no CSV import. You enter each ticker and position size by hand. For a five-line portfolio that's a minute; for forty lines it isn't, and there's no way around it today. What you get back in exchange is a report you can audit line by line, because every weight in it traces to a published holdings file.
Two things are worth checking before you add the next fund. Look at how many of your positions each of your ten largest companies arrives through — if the answer is three or four, the funds are doing one job. And read the coverage ratio first, because a concentration figure computed over 60% of a portfolio is a statement about 60% of a portfolio. For a single pair of funds, the ETF overlap pages publish the same arithmetic with the shared holdings and each fund's weights shown.
Key takeaways
- A portfolio X-Ray multiplies each fund's weight in your portfolio by each company's weight inside the fund and sums every route to the same company — the report is what you own, not what you bought.
- The worked example turns a 15% Apple position into 21.4% of the portfolio, and hands you a 7.1% NVIDIA position nobody chose.
- Duplication is a portfolio-level effect — 238 companies in that portfolio arrive by more than one route and hold 70.6% of the money — and effective holdings answers "how concentrated is this really" in a way a position count can't: 2,716 companies behaving like 17.7.
- Read the coverage ratio before the concentration figures. Below ~75% coverage they understate your concentration, and even complete issuer files stop short: VXUS's published weights reach 85.0% of the fund.
- Morningstar retired the free X-Ray and Instant X-Ray for its Europe, Canada and Asia sites effective April 17, 2025, per its own notice of April 15, 2025 — and the free tool no longer works in the US either, undocumented. X-Ray itself is alive inside Morningstar Investor, at $249 a year in the US as of August 2026.
This article is for information and education only and is not investment advice. Analytics referenced are computed as described in our methodology; see our disclosures.