Does SCHD overlap with VTI? I measured every holding — 99.8% of it is already inside

On a look-through of all 100 holdings as of 25 August 2026, 99.8% of SCHD's weight sits inside
VTI. Held alongside a total-market fund, Schwab US Dividend Equity ETF adds almost no new
companies — it re-weights ones you already own.

I worked through SCHD's holdings and compared them against a thousand-plus US-listed equity
ETFs. Three findings, none of which appears on any published fund profile I could find.

SCHD, as of 25 August 2026

How much does SCHD overlap with VTI?

99.8% of SCHD's weight sits inside VTI as of 25 August 2026. Against VT it is 99.3%, against
VYM 99.3%, and against SCHX 97.3%. Going the other way, SCHD accounts for only 7.3% of VTI — it
sits inside the broad fund rather than beside it.

That last row is why the measure is worth trusting. VIG is the same category and the same
dividend framing, and it comes back at 55% — VIG is genuinely a different portfolio from VTI;
SCHD is largely the same one, re-weighted. The calculation discriminates rather than simply
debunking everything it touches.

Should you hold SCHD and VTI together?

That is a decision, not a number, but here is the number the decision turns on: holding SCHD
alongside VTI adds essentially no companies you do not already own — 99.8% of SCHD's weight is
inside VTI — so what you are buying is a tilt in weighting, not additional diversification.
Whether a dividend-quality tilt is worth holding is a separate question, and a reasonable one.
It is just not a diversification question.

Is SCHD expensive right now?

Both answers are true at once, and this is the finding I care about most.

Against its peers, SCHD is cheap. Rolling every holding's valuation up to fund level, SCHD
traded at 16.6× forward earnings on 25 August 2026 — the cheapest of the five largest US
dividend ETFs, against a category median of 16.9×.

Against itself, SCHD is expensive. Measured against its own nine-year record, SCHD's trailing
P/E of 20.2× on 25 August 2026 sits at the 95th percentile — its median over that period is
17.1× and its low is 13.0×.

Funds screening for dividend growth select companies the market already prices richly, so the
whole peer group re-rates together. The comparison table moves as one and tells you nothing
about level.

Only one of those two numbers appears on a comparison table. The peer view and the
historical view point in opposite directions, and the view almost everyone uses is the one that
cannot see it.

Is SCHD concentrated?

Yes — 13 of SCHD's 100 companies carry half the fund, and its ten largest are 42.3% of it, as
of 25 August 2026. On effective holdings — the equally-weighted count that would produce the
same concentration — SCHD behaves like a 34-stock portfolio, more concentrated than 88% of US
dividend funds.

Concentration is about weight distribution, not holding count. "100 holdings" is true and tells
you almost nothing.

Why none of this is on a fact sheet

Not because anyone is hiding it. Each of these figures requires looking through the fund to
the companies underneath, mapping those companies to a stable identity so they can be matched
across funds, and recomputing as holdings change. A fact sheet is a snapshot of one fund; these
are relationships between funds, and they move.

On ETF Copilot's nightly recomputation across the US-listed equity universe — which is where the
peer-group and percentile figures above come from — doing this once for one fund is an
afternoon's work. Doing it every night for all of them is the part that took a while.

Check it on any pair you hold

Take two funds you hold together and ask what share of the smaller one's weight already sits
inside the larger. Above 95% and you own one position with extra steps. At 55%, like VIG
against VTI, you own two things.

That question is answerable. It just isn't answered on the fund's own page.

I build ETF Copilot — disclosing that it's mine. Every figure above
is from its nightly recomputation, dated 25 August 2026, and is checkable on the site without an
account.