How Much Eli Lilly (LLY) Are You Really Betting On?

Without you picking it, a single pharmaceutical stock may have quietly become one of the largest positions inside your funds.

Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly (LLY) is held across 50 equity funds we track, and in some cases, it has grown into a truly significant position. If you own broad health care ETFs, you likely have more exposure to this one company than you think. The stock’s performance has been remarkable, but that same run-up has created a concentrated risk that you never actively chose to take on.

How Stretched Has The Stock Become?

Eli Lilly (LLY) has delivered a powerful return of +51% over the past year, with much of that coming in the last three months, which saw a +41% gain. That performance has left the stock trading at $ 1,220.66 (as of July 28, 2026), about 20% above its 200-day moving average. While investors are clearly optimistic, with the stock priced at about 35 times its expected earnings for the year ahead, that gap above its own long-term trend is a simple measure of how far and fast it has moved.

Which Funds Carry The Heaviest Load?

The funds most exposed to Eli Lilly’s run are also the ones carrying the most single-stock risk going forward. The State Street Health Care Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLV), for example, holds LLY at about 16.1% of the fund and returned +24% over the past year. The Vanguard Health Care ETF (VHT) has about 14.2% of its assets in LLY and returned +27% over the same period. This serves as a reminder that LLY’s weight in a fund doesn’t map cleanly onto that fund’s total return, since dozens of other holdings are moving too. This kind of weighting raises natural questions about portfolio diversification.

What A Simple Pullback Would Cost

This is not a prediction, but a scenario to make the risk concrete. If LLY simply fell back to its 200-day average, it would represent a drop of about 17% from its current price. For the funds holding it, the math is direct. In that scenario, XLV would lose about 2.7% from this one holding alone. VHT would lose about 2.4% from its LLY position. Even a more diversified fund like the Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF (VIG), with a 4.2% weight, would see a 0.7% drag from this single name.

The problem is that this exposure is sticky. You can’t surgically sell just the LLY shares inside your ETF. To reduce your position, you have to sell the entire fund, which could trigger a taxable capital gain on years of appreciation. This tax trap often leads investors to let the concentration quietly build.

A Way To Keep The Theme, Not The Concentration

If you want to maintain exposure to the health care sector while dialing back single-name risk, there are alternatives. The Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight Health Care ETF (RSPH) offers a different approach. It holds LLY at about 1.7% of the fund, a fraction of the 16.1% in the State Street Health Care Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLV). Over the past year, RSPH returned +21%, not far behind the +24% for XLV, but with far less reliance on one stock’s continued climb.

The goal here is awareness. The gains from Eli Lilly have been real, and they are now embedded in your portfolio. Understanding exactly how much you are betting on one name is the first step in deciding if that is a risk you are still comfortable taking.

How To Check Your Own Exposure

Whether this is a name you are happy to keep riding, or one you would rather not own quite so much of, the first move is the same: see your true exposure to it, then find funds that carry the same theme with less of any single stock. A fund’s name tells you almost nothing about how concentrated it has quietly become.

Our ETF Valuation and Performance Scorecard ranks the major ETFs side by side on valuation, return, and risk, so you can see which funds lean hardest on a handful of names and which spread the exposure while keeping the performance.

Is There A Smarter Way To Hold Winners?

And if the whole problem, a winner quietly growing into an outsized, hard-to-trim position you never sized on purpose, is something you would rather avoid by design, there is another way to think about it. An index fund holds whatever its benchmark dictates and never trims a winner for you, so concentration builds silently until a pullback does the trimming.

Our High Quality (HQ) Portfolio takes the opposite approach: rule-based, multi-factor selection across different kinds of businesses, re-balanced on a schedule, so winners get trimmed and no single name quietly becomes the whole position. It has a record of outpacing a benchmark that combines the three major indices – the S&P 500, S&P Mid-cap, and Russell 2000.