VOO vs QQQ: Returns, Risk and Overlap Compared

Over the last ten years, $10,000 in QQQ became about $65,800 and the same $10,000 in VOO became about $42,000. That gap is why "VOO vs QQQ" is the most-searched ETF comparison there is, and why the comparison is usually framed as a question about returns. It is not one. QQQ has beaten VOO because it owns more of the companies that happened to win, and it owns more of them because it is a narrower, more concentrated fund — 100 stocks against 500, the ten largest making up nearly half of it, and a decade in which those ten did better than everything else on earth.

That is the entire trade. QQQ's extra return is not free alpha; it is payment for holding a fund that fell 33% in 2022 while VOO fell 18%, and that once fell 83% and took about fifteen years to recover. Whether you should own it depends on whether you can hold it through the next one of those, not on which line is higher on the chart today.

Short version: VOO is the default — the whole U.S. large-cap market at 0.03%. QQQ is a deliberate tilt toward technology and growth, worth making with a slice of the portfolio you will not touch for a decade, and worth making through QQQM rather than QQQ. Owning both is fine as long as you know that 94% of QQQ is already inside VOO.

The two fundsSame top three, different everything else

The rule that builds each index explains everything below it. The S&P 500 is chosen by a committee to represent the U.S. large-cap market across every sector. The Nasdaq-100 is chosen by a rule: the hundred largest non-financial companies whose shares trade on the Nasdaq exchange. It is not a technology index by design — it is a listing-venue index that happens to be dominated by technology, because that is who lists on Nasdaq. Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan, ExxonMobil, Johnson & Johnson and Walmart are all among the largest companies in America and none of them is in QQQ, because they trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

The overlap94% of QQQ is already in VOO

Both funds are weighted by market value, so they share their biggest names. NVIDIA, Apple and Microsoft are the top three of both, at 22.2% of QQQ and 20.8% of VOO. The difference is what comes next.

ETF overlap tools put the numbers at about 85 shared holdings, 94% of QQQ's assets also held by VOO, and 54% of VOO's assets also held by QQQ, with a monthly return correlation of about 0.91. Two conclusions follow. First, holding both funds is not diversification — it is a way of turning up the weight on the same forty tech-heavy names. Second, that is a perfectly reasonable thing to do on purpose, as a tilt, as long as you stop calling it a second fund. Our diversification explainer covers why a portfolio's risk is set by what its holdings have in common, not by how many tickers it lists.

The returnsEight years, one decisive year

QQQ has beaten VOO in seven of the last eight calendar years. The size of the lead, though, comes from two years, and the cost of it comes from one.

Three things in that table matter more than the totals.

• 2020 and 2023 are the whole story. QQQ beat VOO by 30 points in 2020 and by 29 points in 2023. Take those two years out and VOO comes out ahead over the other six — $1 grew to $1.95 in VOO and $1.81 in QQQ. Both were years when a handful of the largest technology companies re-rated sharply — the pandemic in 2020, AI in 2023 — and QQQ owned two or three times as much of them.
• 2022 cost QQQ almost half of its lead. A $100,000 position lost $18,170 in VOO and $32,580 in QQQ. Over 2022 and 2023 together, QQQ made 4.4% and VOO made 3.4% — after the crash and the record rebound, two years of holding the more volatile fund earned one extra point.
• The gap compounds. At the 10-year annualised rates, 15.45% against 20.74%, the difference of five points a year is the difference between $42,000 and $65,800 on $10,000. Nobody should expect a 20% annual return to continue; but the arithmetic of a persistent tilt is exactly this, in both directions.

The riskWhat a 33% loss actually requires

The difference between an 18% fall and a 33% fall is larger than the fifteen points suggest, because recovery is not symmetric.

QQQ needed a 48% gain to get back to its 2021 high after 2022, and got 55% in 2023 — so it recovered in one year, and it is easy to remember 2022 as a scare rather than a lesson. The 2000 version needed a 488% gain. QQQ's realised volatility over the last decade is 17.2% a year against VOO's 14.1%, about 1.2 times as much; its worst drawdown in that window was 35% against VOO's 34%, which sounds similar until you notice VOO's came from the 2020 pandemic crash that hit every stock, and QQQ's came from an ordinary rate-hiking cycle that hit growth stocks specifically. The next drawdown will not treat the two funds alike either.

The practical question is not "which fund has the higher return" but "how much of my money can be in a fund that can halve." If the answer is "all of it, and I would keep buying," QQQ is a legitimate core holding. If the answer involves the word "probably," it is a satellite, and the size of the satellite is the decision. The Asset Allocation Calculator lets you set that split against your horizon and see what a 33% fall on the growth slice does to the whole.

The feeSix times the cost, and it still is not the point

VOO charges 0.03%; QQQ charges 0.18% since Invesco cut it from 0.20% in December 2025; QQQM, Invesco's own copy of the same index launched in 2020 for buy-and-hold investors, charges 0.15%. On $10,000 that is $3, $18 and $15 a year.

Two readings of that table are both correct. Against VOO, the fee is real: $33,000 on a $100,000 holding over thirty years is about 4.4% of the final balance, and it buys nothing — it is the price of the Nasdaq-100 wrapper. Against QQQ's return edge, the fee is nothing: if the Nasdaq-100 beats the S&P 500 by even one point a year, the 0.15-point fee gap is a rounding error, and if it trails, the fee is the least of your problems. Choose the index first; then, having chosen the Nasdaq-100, choose QQQM over QQQ, because they hold the same stocks and the $6,500 difference over thirty years on $100,000 is genuinely free. QQQ's higher fee pays for the deepest options market of any ETF — a real benefit to traders and worth nothing to a saver. (The same split exists inside the S&P 500 between SPY and VOO — see our SPY vs VOO vs IVV comparison.) You can check any balance and horizon yourself in the Compound Interest Calculator: enter the gross return minus each fund's fee and compare the two endings.

DividendsA side effect, not a feature

VOO yields about 1.05%; QQQ about 0.42%. Neither is an income fund, and the difference is not a reason to choose either: it reflects that the Nasdaq-100's companies retain more of their earnings to reinvest, and the S&P 500 includes utilities, staples, banks and energy that pay out more. An investor who wants the Nasdaq-100 and a monthly cheque is looking at JEPQ, which sells options on the index to fund a much larger distribution and gives up a slice of the upside to do it; the trade-off is laid out in our JEPI vs JEPQ comparison. For everyone else, the yield gap is a quarter of a percent that the total return already accounts for.

How to hold themThree honest portfolios

Whichever you choose, the mistake to avoid is holding VOO and QQQ side by side and reading them as two diversified positions. In a portfolio tracker they show up as two lines; in a downturn they move as one. Our VOO vs VTI comparison covers the other direction of tilt — adding the 3,000 smaller companies VTI owns — which is the one that actually adds something QQQ and VOO both lack.

Where these numbers come from

Expense ratios are the sponsors' published figures: Vanguard 0.03% for VOO; Invesco 0.18% for QQQ (reduced from 0.20% on December 19, 2025, when QQQ converted from a unit investment trust to an open-end fund) and 0.15% for QQQM. Assets, yields, holdings weights, ten-year annualised returns, volatility, overlap and correlation are from stockanalysis.com and MarketXLS fund comparison data dated September 18, 2026; they drift daily and are quoted to show scale. Calendar-year total returns for 2018–2025 are from totalrealreturns.com and stockanalysis.com. The growth-of-$10,000, mix, recovery and fee-drag figures are arithmetic in drafts/voo-vs-qqq-numbers.mjs: annual compounding of the published calendar-year returns; blends rebalanced once a year; and, for the fee table, an identical 7% gross return compounded monthly with each fund's expense ratio deducted monthly, so every dollar of difference is the fee alone. The 7% gross assumption is conservative for U.S. stocks and understates the dollar gap. The dot-com figures — an 83% fall from March 2000 to October 2002 and a recovery of the prior high in 2015 — are index history widely reported by Invesco and the financial press, not our calculation. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell a security.

Frequently asked questions

Is QQQ better than VOO? It has returned more — about 20.7% a year against 15.5% over the last decade — because it is more concentrated in the large technology companies that led that decade. It is also more volatile, fell nearly twice as far in 2022, and once took fifteen years to recover a peak. "Better" depends on whether you can hold it through that.

Should I own both VOO and QQQ? Only as a deliberate tilt. About 94% of QQQ's assets are already inside VOO, so adding QQQ mostly increases your weight in the same forty stocks. Decide the size of the growth slice on purpose, use QQQM for it, and rebalance once a year.

What is the difference between QQQ and QQQM? The same Nasdaq-100 index and the same holdings from the same sponsor. QQQ charges 0.18% and has the deepest options market of any ETF; QQQM charges 0.15% and is meant for buy-and-hold investors. For a saver, QQQM is simply cheaper.

Why does QQQ have no banks or oil companies? Because the Nasdaq-100 is chosen by listing venue, not by sector: the hundred largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange. JPMorgan, Berkshire Hathaway and ExxonMobil trade on the NYSE, so they are in VOO and not in QQQ.

How much did QQQ lose in the dot-com crash? About 83% from its March 2000 peak to October 2002. The Nasdaq did not regain the 2000 high until 2015. The S&P 500 fell roughly 49% over the same period and recovered by 2007. That history, not 2022, is the risk a Nasdaq-100 holder is being paid for.