I have mostly VOO portfolio. What would be a strategy to exclude exposure to AI companies?

Yeah, let’s do VOO, but specifically take out the sector that’s shown the most growth. That’ll show them.

Came here looking for this. This is the correct answer.

I mean, just do VT if you want int exposure

At this point you can’t avoid exposure to AI if you are looking for growth. You either have to just save your money or buy defensive staples like WM or KO.

Almost every company is leveraged into it, even if they aren’t actually a tech company. If AI crashes literally everything will be affected.

there is a fund that is s&p 500 less the mag seven, then you could add back in the individual stocks of mag 7 that you like

or go equal weight RSP index fund

but at least w VOO you dont have spacex for at least a year

If you want equal weight exposure instead of being heavily AI concentrated I would consider RSP

There are many, many iterations of the S&P 500 ex-whatever you can think of. Here is a new 500 ex-AI one, for example.

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/ai-goldman-sachs-stocks-index

it's not really "left up to NASA" if the government defunds them.

EXUS.

You can exclude MAG7 easily but you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you believe that those companies will fail then just hold on to VOO until they fail and they will leave the portfolio, being replaced by stronger companies. If you object to them on a personal basis then tough luck. Find a safe, conservative ESG etf and be a social justice warrior living in poverty and blaming it on the man keeping you down.

If you want some tech or semiconductor exposure and you’re afraid of the new IPO’s coming in. What about going into actively managed etf of fund. Stay out of passive index.

SMH, SOXX

Wrong way of thinking. NASA has been critically underfunded for decades. If NASA receives the kind of funding it received back in its heydey, we would be in a completely different situation right now. Starving science and technology research to the point of failure and then pointing to said self-created failure as the reason it should be privatized, is exactly the flawed logic people like Elon and others want you to believe.

Not directed at you at all but what is it lately with people trying to avoid certain things in Index Funds? People are fear mongering on social media that Space X is going to destroy their retirement accounts lol

I’ve learned that emotional investing is about the same as emotional gambling…it doesn’t really work out.

I would argue the best thing to do is nothing. If OP is okay with MAG7 but not SPCX, TSLA, or any of the AI model companies, then that's basically what VOO is except TSLA. Open AI, Antropic, and SPCX are not in VOO. If they really want they can buy a little TSLS to offset the couple percent that makes up TSLA.

But the reality is that OPs entire premise is just horribly misinformed and illogical. 1. Most of the companies they listed are not in VOO. 2. Many of the companies OP is apparently okay with are the counter parties to the companies they are worried about. If open AI and Antropic fail, the Mag7 are going to get absolutely wrecked. Google and Meta both just announced equity issuance to fund yet MORE AI capex. So now it's not just cash flow, but debt and stock dilution by them.

It's fine to want to take "AI risk" off the table, but the way OP is asking to do it is not well thought out and frankly, it's quite clear they have no idea what they are doing.

They should continue to do what they've been doing the entire time. Buy VOO and do nothing lol

What this will accomplish is typically lower standard deviation/volatility. Correlation will still be fairly high compared to the index, but if you want smoother more stable returns that'll help smooth things out for ya. With how grossly overweight the biggest players in the index are, those are two low-cost and easy to understand solutions for retail clients to explore. I have a lot more fun and complex tricks up my sleeve, but they're more costly. Some of my favorite BlackRock ETFs have higher expense ratios but are justified by returns. Like, the long-short and the rotating thematic. Fun stuff to research! But the two I've shared are low cost for what they do. I'm sorta used to comparing management fees across industry norms and how actively they are managed. 🤙🏻

Dow jones and Berkshire have less AI exposure. The specific concern being the circular accounting non sense going around. Huge amounts of money investing in AI, but I doubt we’ll see proportional advancements any time soon

Vanguard value (VTV) excludes a lot of the hot stocks, but you need to consider that those top companies are also the most successful.

If you don't want high tech & Semi-conductors in your portfolio taka a look at Invesco ETF, PWV, Large Cap value ETF. PWV has no overlap to SOXX and onlt 2% overlap to XLK.

PWV has had 24.6% yearly return, slightly beating the SP-500 23.66% yearly return.

PWV has 65% return over has the last 3 years. PNW has expense ratio of 0.55%. This funds 3 kargest sectors are Finance, Energy minerals and Health technology.

PWV, top 10 holdings:

1. ABBV
2. UNH
3. WFC
4. MS
5. GS
6. C
7. BAC
8. CVX
9. JPM
10. JNJ

Good luck.

VOO would drop 3%

Give back your unrealized gains

As someone who (usually) prides himself on proper spelling/usage/grammar, I appreciate this correction!

It'll be hard to find a similar ETF with with a lower ER. Not hard to keep like ~20% of your fund in 7 tickers. Someone has to go in and rebalance it to keep the weights equal after all.

You could always direct index and find out why it costs more! 🤣

For years, people discussing individual stocks on here were lectured to about "you should just use index funds" and now so many of the index fund investors are fleeing over things that will ultimately be a few % of the index at most.

You should all just own SPLV instead.

Historically but certainly not recently. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. The problem with equal weighting is it requires that you trim winners to buy more of the losers.

If you sold Nvidia every quarter on its generational run up you are missing the massive gains of the right tail of the return distribution. Better to let momentum do its thing, at least it has been for the last few decades.

also worth noting:

valuations can feel extreme, but indexes don’t price beliefs , they price market cap weightings