We Analyzed 52 Real Dividend Portfolios — Here's What Retail Investors Actually Hold in 2026

Personal-finance content is full of confident claims about what retail investors own. “Everyone buys VOO.” “Dividend investors are all over-diversified.” “Crypto is a separate demographic from index investors.” These are the stories we all repeat. But when you actually look at a sample of real portfolios — positions, cost basis, holdings, and types — the pattern is different from every one of those narratives.

At Infnits, we track dividend and portfolio data for investors who voluntarily connect their brokerage accounts. As of April 2026, 52 users had connected at least one account, contributing 723 individual positions across 400 unique tickers. This post is a fully anonymized breakdown of what those portfolios actually contain. No user is identifiable — we're reporting aggregates only.

What the median portfolio actually looks like

Before we get to ticker-level detail, the portfolio-level stats:

The median is the number worth sitting with. Half of the portfolios we looked at hold five positions or fewer. That does not match the “hold 30–50 dividend stocks for diversification” narrative that dominates dividend-investing subreddits. It also does not match the “one-ETF-and-done” trope — median-5 is not one-ETF-and-done, it's a small collection of specific convictions.

The mean is heavily pulled up by outliers — the user with 80 positions alone adds more than a standard deviation of variance. A small number of investors are maintaining spreadsheet-worthy collections, but they are not the norm.

The top 10 most-held positions

Here is what the data actually says. Each number is “what percentage of the 52 portfolios contain this ticker.”

A few of these are surprising enough to call out individually:

VOO is in half of the portfolios. That's the boring-but-correct answer: the single most widely-held security in our sample is an S&P 500 index ETF. The “just buy VOO” Reddit meme is empirically what half of our users actually do.

Dogecoin is in the top 10. 15% of portfolios — 8 of 52 — hold DOGE. That's more than hold Alphabet (GOOGL appeared in only 11.5%). This is not the profile of a pure dividend-income investor. Portfolios in our sample routinely mix long-term equity, dividend ETFs, and meme-adjacent crypto.

SCHD is in #5 but only 23% of portfolios. Given the Reddit fervor around SCHD, we expected it higher. In practice, only about 1 in 4 of our users holds it. The dividend-ETF story is more fragmented than the SCHD-dominant narrative suggests.

No Berkshire, no Johnson & Johnson, no Coca-Cola in the top 10. The classic dividend stalwarts are less common in modern retail portfolios than tech-heavy individual names. Apple is a dividend payer, but it's a tech stock held for growth. The top 10 is dominated by growth equities plus one index ETF plus one dividend ETF plus crypto.

The concentration finding: retail is much more concentrated than anyone talks about

This is the finding we didn't expect and that has real consequences for how we think about risk in retail portfolios.

Read that top row again: on average, the single largest position in a retail portfolio is nearly two-thirds of the entire portfolio's value. The median user has 66% concentrated in one holding. Nearly half (46%) have more than 75% of their entire wealth in one security. This is not diversification in any sense a financial planner would recognize.

Now, some of this is a connection-flow artifact: users who link a 401(k) that's 100% in a target-date fund show up as “100% in one position” even though that fund itself is diversified. Others may have only connected one account of several. Both caveats matter. But even if we halve the effect to account for those artifacts, the concentration is striking — it's consistent with the classic retail pattern of “big conviction in one name, small positions around the edges.”

Our own investor archetype model (we classify portfolios into 13 behavioral types) assigns 28% of users to “Big Bets” — the concentrated-high-conviction archetype. That's the most common classification in our sample, not “Index Investor” (18%) or any of the balanced archetypes.

Asset-type mix: most investors blend everything

How do those 723 positions split by asset type?

Individual stock picking is alive. 79% of users hold at least one individual equity. 75% also hold at least one ETF. 62% hold both simultaneously — the classic core/satellite structure: a broad-market or dividend ETF as the core, with individual stock picks as the satellites.

Only 17% hold ETFs exclusively and only 13% hold individual stocks exclusively. The “ETF purists” vs. “stock pickers” dichotomy is mostly fictional. Most modern retail investors do both.

Dividend ETF usage

Because Infnits users skew dividend-focused, we paid specific attention to which dividend-oriented ETFs appear:

SCHD is clearly dominant in its category — held 2–3x more often than any other dividend ETF. But only 35% of users hold any dividend-focused ETF at all. If you read r/dividends daily you'd expect that number to be 80%+. It's 35%.

An interesting emerging pattern: SPYI and QQQI (both NEOS covered-call high-income ETFs) each appear in 10% of portfolios. Combined with JEPI/JEPQ, covered-call income ETFs appear in about 17% of portfolios — a meaningful fraction despite being relatively new products (SPYI launched late 2022, QQQI in early 2024). The high-yield options-overlay category is growing fast in actual retail behavior.

Crypto holdings: not a separate demographic

Twelve of our 52 users (23%) hold at least one cryptocurrency inside an account that also contains traditional securities. This is worth underlining because it contradicts the common assumption that “dividend investors” and “crypto holders” are disjoint groups.

The most-held cryptos:

• BTC — 9 users (17% of all portfolios)
• DOGE — 8 users (15%)
• ETH — 6 users (12%)
• XRP — 6 users (12%)
• SHIB — 5 users (10%)

The Bitcoin/Ethereum concentration is expected. The DOGE / SHIB concentration is the surprise: speculative memecoins sit in the same brokerage accounts as VOO and SCHD, for a meaningful fraction of users. This is not behavior a financial planner would recommend, but it is empirically how a lot of retail actually invests in 2026.

What's missing: the dividend classics

We looked explicitly for the classic dividend-investing names you see on every dividend-investing Reddit post — Dividend Aristocrats, Kings, and staples. Of the 400 unique tickers held across our sample, here's how often the top classics appear:

• Coca-Cola (KO) — below top 25
• Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) — below top 25
• Procter & Gamble (PG) — below top 25
• Altria (MO) — below top 25 (despite being SCHD's #1 weight)
• Verizon (VZ) — below top 25

None of these made our top 25. This surprised us. Either (a) our users are younger/more growth-leaning than the average r/dividends poster, (b) they hold these classics indirectly through SCHD/VOO rather than individually, or (c) the dividend-classic universe is a narrower real phenomenon than its internet footprint implies. The truth is probably some mix of all three.

What this says about portfolio tracking

Three implications for anyone building tools for real retail investors:

1. Tools that assume a diversified 30-stock portfolio don't fit the data. Most portfolios are 5 positions or fewer. A tool optimized for 30-name tracking is solving a problem most users don't have. A tool that helps users understand a concentrated portfolio — concentration risk, single-holding sensitivity, sector concentration — is meeting them where they actually are.
2. Mixed-asset tracking is the default. Tools that only handle stocks, or only handle crypto, miss how 23% of users actually invest. This is why Infnits maintained asset-type flexibility from the start even though our primary focus is dividend income.
3. Dividend-focused analytics have a wider audience than the “pure dividend investor” stereotype. Investors holding VOO + AAPL + BTC still care about dividend income — just not exclusively. Tools that segregate users into “dividend investor” vs “growth investor” buckets are over-fitting.

Caveats we can't avoid mentioning

A sample of 52 users has limits. Some specific ones worth flagging honestly:

• Self-selection. People who download a dividend-tracking app are not a random sample of the investing public.
• Single-account connections. Some users linked only one of multiple accounts. Retirement accounts (401k, 403b) are particularly under-represented because they often require manual connection.
• Point-in-time snapshot. This is a single-day analysis in April 2026. Positions drift.
• Type classification. 6% of positions didn't have a clean asset-type tag, which affects the equity/ETF/crypto splits slightly.

None of those caveats change the directional findings: concentration is much higher than the canon suggests, median holdings are much lower, and the mix of asset types is much more diverse within individual portfolios than the discourse assumes.

Methodology

All data comes from Infnits user accounts that have voluntarily connected a brokerage via SnapTrade or Plaid. The analysis used the latest portfolio snapshot per user as of 2026-04-20. No user identifiers, account numbers, or personally identifying data appears in this post — only anonymized aggregate counts and percentages. Ticker-level data (“how many users hold VOO”) reveals nothing about any individual user.

If you want to see how your own portfolio compares against these patterns — concentration, archetype, holdings mix — the Infnits app runs all of these analyses against your own connected accounts for free. Your data is yours. We never publish individual portfolios, even anonymized.

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