Sector exposure

Sector exposure (or sector allocation) is the breakdown of a fund's portfolio by industry sector, expressed as percentage weights that sum to roughly 100% of invested assets. Equity funds usually report ten or eleven sectors such as information technology, financials, healthcare, industrials and energy; bond funds report sectors like government, corporate, securitised and cash instead.

Fund houses use different classification schemes and different levels of granularity, so two funds with similar portfolios can print slightly different tables.

Why it matters

Sector weights explain much of a fund's behaviour. A global equity index with a large technology weight moves with that sector whatever its name says, and an "income" fund with heavy financials exposure carries a specific set of risks. For portfolio look-through, summing sector weights across several funds shows concentrations a client could not see fund by fund. Compliance teams also use sector limits as a monitoring rule.

In the API

The sector table is returned as sector, an array of { label, weight }, with a one-word summary of the fund's tilt in profile.sectorTilt.

json
{
  "sector": [
    { "label": "Information Technology", "weight": 26.1 },
    { "label": "Financials", "weight": 15.4 },
    { "label": "Health Care", "weight": 10.2 }
  ],
  "profile": { "sectorTilt": "technology-heavy" }
}

Example values. Weights are percentages of the portfolio as of dataAsOf.

Common pitfalls

• Sector labels differ between issuers ("Health Care" versus "Healthcare", "Technology" versus "Information Technology"). Normalise before aggregating across funds.
• Some tables include a cash or derivatives line, so totals may not be exactly 100%.