One Theme, Four Portfolios

ABSTRACT

One label does not produce one portfolio.

Monopoly power, economic moats, durable quality: four exchange-traded funds promise some version of the same idea. Do they deliver the same portfolio? We compare MPLY, MOAT, TOLL and the now-closed CZAR, first through their documented strategies and observed returns, then through a simulation of the stocks they recently held. The common live history is short, so we run a separate counterfactual from January 2016 to September 2026, asking how those holdings would have behaved under buy-and-hold and under monthly rebalancing. The results are less about the theme than about a few individual winners. Under buy-and-hold, Nvidia alone accounts for 71.5% of MPLY's total gain and 61.4% of MOAT's. One stock. Rebalancing monthly cuts those direct shares to 21.5% and 11.2%, and replacing each basket's largest contributor with cash still leaves annualized returns of 24.40%, 15.66%, 23.04% and 13.32%, respectively. The rankings themselves move with the starting date. None of this establishes a causal monopoly premium, and a replay of recent holdings cannot reconstruct what managers actually did. What it does show is more useful: one theme, four very different portfolios, with returns decided by the stocks behind the label.

THE ANALYTICAL JOURNEY

Follow the dominant stock through each test.

Buy-and-hold lets winners occupy more of the basket. Monthly rebalancing restores the frozen target weights. The last column reruns the monthly portfolio after replacing its largest full-period contributor with zero-interest cash from the beginning.

Swipe the table to see the monthly and exclusion results →

Gain share is a dollar-profit attribution, not a percentage of ending wealth. Remaining CAGR is recalculated from a different portfolio; it is not obtained by subtracting the gain share.

FINDINGS

The strongest result is the sequence, not the ranking.

FIGURES

A high ending value can conceal a narrow source.

RESEARCH DESIGN

Observed fund returns and hypothetical holdings returns stay separate.

LIMITATIONS

The backtest knows which holdings survived.

The portfolios use later holdings to ask an earlier historical question. Their selected assets therefore contain survival and selection information that was unavailable in 2016. TOLL's private Kalshi exposure remains in zero-return cash; CZAR uses a June 30 pre-closure filing; five CZAR closes and its final liquidation payment remain unverified.

Provider-adjusted histories are not a complete independent reconstruction of every split, dividend, spin-off, and currency conversion. The paper reports targeted checks and preserves the remaining uncertainty. None of the results establishes a causal monopoly premium, persistent manager skill, or a forecast of future ETF performance.

PAPER AND RECORDS

The canonical page keeps the status visible.

A matching MPRA deposit (item 130838) was also placed in repository review. Neither repository screening nor journal submission is peer review or an editorial acceptance. The return inputs, derived paths, source receipts, and audit files remain preserved in the research project; credentials and restricted raw payloads are not published.

CITATION

Cite the canonical research page.

Mashhour, H. (2026). One Theme, Four Portfolios: From Monopoly-Themed ETFs to the Stocks Behind Their Returns. Monopoly MOAT. https://mplymoat.com/research/monopoly-etf-portfolios/

@misc{mashhour2026fourportfolios,
  author = {Hesham Mashhour},
  title = {One Theme, Four Portfolios: From Monopoly-Themed ETFs to the Stocks Behind Their Returns},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Monopoly MOAT},
  howpublished = {Working paper, version 0.3},
  url = {https://mplymoat.com/research/monopoly-etf-portfolios/}
}