What 1 share of VT represents

Stock market valuations fluctuate over time and $ amounts of holdings in the short term can be deceiving.

This got me thinking, what if we instead looked at what % of the stock market your holdings represented instead?


Using VT as our benchmark we can calculate that on 2021-08-31:

  • VT closed at $106.61
  • It represented 3.10% of AAPL
  • AAPL’s market cap was $2.525 trillion

This gives us the results of:

  • VT represented a market of $81.45 trillion (total global equities were ~$90 trillion)
  • 1 share of VT represented 1/764 billionth of its underlyings

So instead of looking at 100 VT shares as ~$10k we could consider it as owning approximately 1/8bn of total global equities, your “fair share” if everyone on the planet owned an equal amount.

Extrapolating approximately:

  • 1000 VT = currently $100k = 1/800m of global equities
  • 10,000 VT = currently $1m = 1/80m of global equities

If your intention if long term accrual then consider blocking out the noise of short term $ fluctuations and instead use this framework of accruing an absolute number of shares / % of global equities instead.

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It’s an interesting perspective.

For your information, FTSE Russell publishes the market capitalization of the FTSE Global All Cap Index, so you can skip the indirect calculation via AAPL. According to the FTSE Factsheet, the total market capitalization of the index was USD 77.163 trillion on 2021-08-31.

https://research.ftserussell.com/Analytics/Factsheets/Home/DownloadSingleIssue?issueName=GEISLMS&IsManual=false

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