By Daniel Sparks
Publication Date: 2026-10-02 00:26:00
The VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH +1.45%) is having a huge 2026. As of midday on Sept. 30, the fund sat near $608 a share, up about 69% from its $360.13 close on the last trading day of 2025. This leaves it well ahead of the S&P 500 (^GSPC +0.19%).
Nvidia (NVDA +1.09%), the fund’s top holding at about 19% of assets as of Sept. 29, has risen too, but nowhere near as much.
The artificial intelligence (AI) chip leader’s stock traded around $230 as of this writing, about 23% over its $186.50 year-end close. Put another way, the fund has returned about three times as much as its biggest position this year.
I think this gap says more about how a chip fund is built than about Nvidia. About four-fifths of the fund’s money is in other chip stocks, and this year, most of the gain came from them.
Image source: Getty Images.
Three stocks powered almost half the gain
Showing how uneven the year’s been, Micron Technology (MU +3.03%) shares have climbed around 276% in 2026, Intel (INTC -0.19%) shares about 223%, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD +0.65%) shares about 181%.
As of Dec. 24, 2025, Nvidia was around 21% of the fund’s assets, while Micron and AMD each made up about 5% and Intel about 4%. By my rough math, if the fund had kept these weights all year, Micron, AMD, and Intel alone would account for about 32 percentage points of its 69% gain. Nvidia would account for only around 5 points.
That means almost half the gain came from about 14% of the money.
The fund’s weights change with…