Your broker sees 20% of your wealth — the other 80% is where the risk lives

It is Sunday morning in Utrecht and Hans, an engineer in his late thirties, is doing the small ritual that millions of European retail investors do each weekend: he opens his Trading 212 app and looks at his portfolio. The donut chart is calm. 80% in a global equities ETF, 20% in a European government-bond fund, the colours arranged in a way the app designers have spent a decade making look reassuring. By the standards of the screen in front of him, Hans is well-diversified.

The screen is also wrong about almost everything that matters.

It does not show the €212,000 apartment Hans owns near Vaartsche Rijn station, of which he has paid off roughly a third. It does not show the €146,000 mortgage against that apartment, indexed to short-term euro rates. It does not show the €40,000 sitting at ING and Bunq after his December bonus. It does not show the pay-as-you-go pension entitlement accruing each month inside ABP, the third-largest pension fund in Europe, of which he understands roughly nothing. By the time Trading 212 has drawn its donut chart, Hans's investments are about a fifth of his wealth, and he is making decisions on the chart as though they were all of it.

How wrong is the donut chart?

Hans is not unusual. The European Central Bank's Household Finance and Consumption Survey, in its 2021 wave, splits the median euro-area household balance sheet into real assets — the home, other property, vehicles, business equity — and financial assets — deposits, life insurance, pensions, funds, direct equities. The real-asset share of total household assets at the median sits at 79.9%. The financial-asset share is 20.1% (HFCS 2021 statistical tables, ECB). The country splits are tight: 77.5% real in Germany, 79.5% in the Netherlands, 79.8% in France, 79.5% in Spain, 81.3% in Italy. There is no version of mainland Europe in which the brokerage app shows the median household more than a fifth of its money.

The HFCS lets us put numbers on Hans. The median Dutch household holds €311,900 in total assets, about 68% of it the household main residence, so call it €212,000 of apartment. Among the 46.2% of NL households that carry a mortgage on that residence, the median outstanding balance is €146,300. Add Hans's €50,000 in IWDA at DEGIRO and you have his balance sheet.

On that balance sheet the Trading 212 donut chart is showing him 19% of his gross assets. The 81% that does not appear is concentrated in one residential building in one Dutch city. Hans's "diversification" rests almost entirely on the Dutch housing market continuing to behave.

The leverage tells the same story from the other side. Equity in the apartment is €212,000 minus €146,300, about €65,700, and that €65,700 of equity is supporting €212,000 of gross property exposure. The asset-to-equity multiplier is 3.2. By any reasonable definition Hans is a leveraged property speculator who occasionally rebalances an ETF.

The currency twist arrives once you look more closely at the 19% the broker does show. IWDA settles in euro and reports a euro price, but its underlying holdings are roughly 72% US-domiciled stocks (country weights on the iShares product page). What Hans sees on the app as a euro number is, under the bonnet, the dollar value of those stocks translated through the prevailing EUR/USD rate. In 2025 that rate ran from 1.0198 in early January to 1.1837 in early September, a 16.1% spread, finishing the year up 13.10% (ECB euro reference exchange rate archive). For most of the year, when Hans saw IWDA "up roughly 10% year-to-date" on his phone, what he was mostly seeing was the dollar weakening; the underlying index moved more like 4–5% in its native currency. The number was real. It was not what Hans thought it was.

Add it all up. The apartment is a concentrated leveraged bet on Dutch rates and Dutch housing. The ETF is, to a first approximation, an unhedged bet on the US dollar. The mortgage is short-term EUR. The cash is no-yield EUR. None of these positions are visible on the same screen as the others; none of them are denominated against each other; and the only number Hans regularly checks captures the least about his actual exposure.

The broker is not lying, it is measuring a different thing

The brokerage industry has spent twenty years getting very good at one job: tracking the positions it holds for its clients. It is excellent at that job. Hans's donut chart is computed in real time, marked to market, rendered in his preferred currency, and presented in colours focus-grouped against thirty competing apps. It is the wrong instrument for the question Hans cares about because nobody designed it to answer that question.

The job Hans actually wants done is a personal balance sheet. Assets on one side. Liabilities on the other. Net worth at the bottom. Refreshed when something moves. Wealthy households pay private bankers for this. Most of Europe writes spreadsheets, which work for one quarter and degrade from there. Rates move. The apartment is revalued. A Sondertilgung (a fee-free extra mortgage payment) clears. A USD position is sold. By the second drift, the household stops trusting either the spreadsheet or the broker, and the question of what to actually do — pay down the mortgage, hold the bond, add to the ETF — is the question the earlier post on mortgage early-repayment versus Bunds works through, and it is unanswerable from either tool alone.

This is the pain Wealthmap's Dashboard, Liabilities, and Manual Assets views are built for together. Hans's IWDA position, the mortgage with its outstanding balance and rate, and the apartment as a manual asset aggregate to one EUR net-worth number that recomputes on each price refresh. The allocation pie is computed across broker holdings, manual real-estate value, and the cash float, so the concentration check runs against the household rather than the slice. The Liabilities view carries the mortgage on the other side of that pie, so home leverage is a number Hans reads off rather than reconstructs.

One limit to be honest about. Wealthmap does not value statutory pension entitlements. The pay-as-you-go entitlement Hans is building inside ABP, the equivalents in Deutsche Rentenversicherung (the German state pension), the régime général (France's general scheme), and the various Dutch second-pillar pots, appear on annual paper statements and on no tracker, ours included. For the median Dutch or German employee that hole is real. The 19% gross-asset figure for Hans is an upper bound on what the broker shows; once the pension is priced in, the broker's window is smaller still.

When the argument doesn't apply

There are households for which the broker really is most of the wealth. Lifelong renters carry a median euro-area net wealth of around €12,000 against €193,200 for owners with a mortgage; for them the brokerage account, where it exists, is the balance sheet. Investors before they have bought property are in the same place. The HFCS reference person aged 16–34 sits at €21,700 of euro-area median net wealth, and once a brokerage account exists it is most of that number. For these households the argument applies in proportion rather than in absolutes. The earlier piece on a tactical Polish-equities overweight is written for an investor in roughly this category, someone building the brokerage side because there is not yet much else.

But for the median mortgaged household in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, or Spain — €100,000 to €500,000 spread across a broker, one or two banks, a home, and a pension — the gap is the default state. The rebalancing decision Hans makes on his Sunday-morning donut chart is, in every meaningful sense, taken against the wrong denominator. The prerequisite for any sensible answer to "what do I do next" is putting the mortgage on the same screen as the ETF in the first place.

It is Sunday morning in Utrecht. The donut chart still looks fine. Hans now knows what it is not telling him.

This is not personal financial advice. Tax treatment, mortgage rules, and pension entitlements depend on your residence and individual circumstances; check with a qualified professional before acting on anything here.