Any opinions on FDHY

So I took a couple positions in some Yieldmax funds this downturn. Grabbed a few hundred shares of MSTY last week. They continued down a bit then bounced back up then down a little. I've lost about $240 in pricing at close today but received a decent divvy which I dripped into another 25 shares.

Took a smaller position in SMCY. At today's close I'm down $293. The divvy was $150.12.

Hope this is of interest to anyone looking at these types of funds.

Is VTI any good?

I currently have about 50% of my 401k in VTI, and the other 50% in one of those target date retirement funds. Is this a bad strategy, or should I consider moving out of VTI into something without dividends?

How did it play out for you?

I do something similar with my 401K account
50% Fidelity retirement fund 2050 and the other 50% in Fidelity 500 (their popular s&p fund)


When I turn 60 I will covert it all to the retirement fund

In my personal brokerage account I used to do a mix of DGRO and SCHD but I recently consolidated them to just SCHD . I currently do a 3 ETF portfolio of 50% SCHD, 30% s&p via SPLG, and 20 % SCHG

Always been interested in JEPI and JEPQ down the road like in 15 years (currently 49 yo) I plan to trade the majority s&p and growth funds and live off of a Mix of SCHD, JEPI and a little JEPQ

12thMan9 said:

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https://pictureperfectportfolios.com/mbox-etf-freedom-day-dividend-strategy-review/

This is where I'm at. MBOX up almost 25% YTD.

Simplicity is the key.

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How long have u been with them? Morningstar rates them very high.

I am conservative investor and like to manage 80% of my funds in different etfs. I plan to buy some of mbox because of how diversified it is, not crazy about his promotional pages with too many nutty pictures. Distracting!

The other 20% I play with in the stock market and I am more risky with those funds.

Thanks for sharing.

I'm not too much of a fan of the option trading ETFs to generate yield. I prefer not and hold dividend stock ETFs. Still looking for a good energy specific one

PunjabiAg said:

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I do something similar 50% Fidelity retirement fund 2050 and the other 50% in Fidelity 500 (their popular s&p fund)


When I turn 60 I will covert it all to the retirement fund

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When I retired, I moved my money from Fidelity to Edward Jones but didn't close my account but rather changed my direct deposit to a couple of hundred dollars each month.
last year I moved a nice chunk of change into Fidelity Crypto account. Don't have to worry about keys or getting hacked etc with Fidelity and crypto.

I also sold some real estate and moved dollars into Fidelity's 500.

I've never invested in crypto but I'm surrounded at young guys at work who are heavily invested

I will look into Fidelity crypto ETF me and the wife have talked about maybe doing 10% of our 401K contributions going forward

Yukon Cornelius said:

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How did it play out for you?

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Holding long term I think. I'll decide what to target next month or accumulate more of what I've got.

PunjabiAg said:

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I've never invested in crypto but I'm surrounded at young guys at work who are heavily invested

I will look into Fidelity crypto ETF me and the wife have talked about maybe doing 10% of our 401K contributions going forward

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Fidelity offers BTC, not sure if they have a crypto ETF.

PunjabiAg said:

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I do something similar with my 401K account
50% Fidelity retirement fund 2050 and the other 50% in Fidelity 500 (their popular s&p fund)


When I turn 60 I will covert it all to the retirement fund

In my personal brokerage account I used to do a mix of DGRO and SCHD but I recently consolidated them to just SCHD . I currently do a 3 ETF portfolio of 50% SCHD, 30% s&p via SPLG, and 20 % SCHG

Always been interested in JEPI and JEPQ down the road like in 15 years (currently 49 yo) I plan to trade the majority s&p and growth funds and live off of a Mix of SCHD, JEPI and a little JEPQ

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I guess I'm wondering if I should be in VOO (no dividends) instead of VTI (has dividends I'm reinvesting). The half that I have in VTI is a rollover account from a previous employer which I can no longer contribute to.

Thunderstruck xx said:

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PunjabiAg said:

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I do something similar with my 401K account
50% Fidelity retirement fund 2050 and the other 50% in Fidelity 500 (their popular s&p fund)


When I turn 60 I will covert it all to the retirement fund

In my personal brokerage account I used to do a mix of DGRO and SCHD but I recently consolidated them to just SCHD . I currently do a 3 ETF portfolio of 50% SCHD, 30% s&p via SPLG, and 20 % SCHG

Always been interested in JEPI and JEPQ down the road like in 15 years (currently 49 yo) I plan to trade the majority s&p and growth funds and live off of a Mix of SCHD, JEPI and a little JEPQ

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I guess I'm wondering if I should be in VOO (no dividends) instead of VTI (has dividends I'm reinvesting). The half that I have in VTI is a rollover account from a previous employer which I can no longer contribute to.

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What do you mean that VOO has no dividends?

This is a similar plan I have. Currently doing a 50/50 split between Schd and FDVV. Looking to maybe add a 3rd or 4th

Thunderstruck xx said:

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Is VTI any good?

I currently have about 50% of my 401k in VTI, and the other 50% in one of those target date retirement funds. Is this a bad strategy, or should I consider moving out of VTI into something without dividends?

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My understanding is that the target date retirement funds tend to be a little conservative. If you're ok with that, then no worries. Personally, I'd prefer a little less conservative at this point in my life. So, for example, my target retirement fund would be 2050 or 2055. Instead of investing in one of those, I would consider in vesting in 2060 or 2065. Maybe even 2070. This would potentially allow me more growth while I still have a higher risk tolerance. Then I can switch to 2055 or 2050 later if my risk tolerance changes.

PunjabiAg said:

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I think I get about a 1.43% yield on SPLG which isn't to bad for S&P and very little for SCHG being growth/tech oriented is only .43%, you are in those for share growth and not dividend .

SCHD is around 4% annual dividend yield there are better yielding dividend stocks out there but the great thing about SCHD is about a 10% average annualized growth on your dividend . Also you need to see what gives you qualified vs ordinary dividends as it affects your tax rate. A lot of dividend like JEPI and most reits are treated as ordinary income which is taxed more than the qualified dividend you get from SCHD and other growth dividend ETfs like VYM and DGRO.

I like dividend growth ETFs because of the year over year dividend growth . Q1 of 2025 SCHD was about 25 cent quarterly dividend per share payout. In about 15 years , that should grow to about a dollar a share payout per quarter . Plus in retirement you get a 10% raise every year to to stay way ahead of inflation

I'm at 10K shares and my goal is 30K shares over the next 15 years , playing the long game I joke with my younger crypto guys at my work that I am the boring investor

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I see that SCHD has a 0.06% expense ratio compared to VTI which has 0.03%. Would you think the type of dividends/dividend growth in SCHD would outweigh the higher expense ratio?

Thunderstruck xx said:

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PunjabiAg said:

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I think I get about a 1.43% yield on SPLG which isn't to bad for S&P and very little for SCHG being growth/tech oriented is only .43%, you are in those for share growth and not dividend .

SCHD is around 4% annual dividend yield there are better yielding dividend stocks out there but the great thing about SCHD is about a 10% average annualized growth on your dividend . Also you need to see what gives you qualified vs ordinary dividends as it affects your tax rate. A lot of dividend like JEPI and most reits are treated as ordinary income which is taxed more than the qualified dividend you get from SCHD and other growth dividend ETfs like VYM and DGRO.

I like dividend growth ETFs because of the year over year dividend growth . Q1 of 2025 SCHD was about 25 cent quarterly dividend per share payout. In about 15 years , that should grow to about a dollar a share payout per quarter . Plus in retirement you get a 10% raise every year to to stay way ahead of inflation

I'm at 10K shares and my goal is 30K shares over the next 15 years , playing the long game I joke with my younger crypto guys at my work that I am the boring investor

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I see that SCHD has a 0.06% expense ratio compared to VTI which has 0.03%. Would you think the type of dividends/dividend growth in SCHD would outweigh the higher expense ratio?

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Everything is a trade off but I'd say 0.06% and 0.03% is irrelevant compared to the different in dividends and the difference in growth and volatility

SCHD is the higher dividend lower growth choice

I made a post looking for something that showed total growth assuming reinvested dividends but I think I came up e.
empty handed

You would probably do yourself wise to check out Rida Morwa's High Dividend investing in seeking alpha. He's been doing it for a long time and is fantastic.

Most S&P tracking ETFs like VOO, Fidelity 500, or SPLG/SPY will be around the .15 to .3 range

SCHD,VYM, and DGRO also track certain indexes and they are gonna be around the .06 to .08 range so you are gonna pay a little more in service fees but still very reasonable considering it saves you the headache of trying to pick individual dividend stocks , they also do a good job of diversifying across different sectors of the economy

With SCHD they track an index but they also do an annual reconstitution and kind of remove and add companies to the ETF for the coming year

Sitting down and plotting out my next YieldMax purchase. Here are the ones I'm considering.

MSTY - This is the big kahuna of YM funds, with the most shares outstanding of all the YM funds, I think, at 1.26 million shares. As mentioned, I bought a few hundred shares during all the turmoil. The stock went down, then has since recovered. I'm showing a small unrealized gain at the moment. The dividend was about 1.33 and I manually dripped and bought more shares with my payout.

At this time I'm happy to stay put on my MSTY investment. MSTY generates income off covered calls on MSTR, and MSTR went on a wild run last year, bringing MSTY along for the ride. It is by far the most popular YM ETF, and it has a history of very nice payouts, sometimes going up around $2/share and gaining a legion of fans.
However, I think my shares are enough for now. I'll reinvest this month's payout and work toward more, if decent divvies continue to hold.

SMCY - My other purchase of YM funds was SMCY. I actually like this one better than MSTY. It is focused on SMCI, and has been paying out higher than MSTY recently. It paid $1.5 which is quite nice. It is a contender for adding shares to accumulate more. At this moment it's still down a couple bucks or so from where I bought in, so adding to the position would be cheaper and lower my cost basis.

LFGY - I am very interested in obtaining shares in this ETF, as it consistently ranks among the best weekly performers. It has been paying out around 40 cents/share every Friday lately, coming in shy of $2/share per month. The price has dropped considerably, sitting in the $34 range lately.

Of course NAV decay is the big bugaboo of these ETFs. LFGY used to be in the mid-50s, so that's a concern. Do I wait and see if it drops further? Or, is it perhaps going to have some staying power down here in the 30s? At the worst part of the tariff scare, it hit a bottom of $31, but bounced back up to its current levels quickly when the scare was over. LFGY focuses on crypto and tech companies. It's a strong contender for acquisition but I wonder if the price continues to fall a few more bucks if I wait a month or two.

MRNY - MRNY focuses on Moderna, and MRNA has just been devastated this year, coming off a 52wh of $170 down to its current valuation in the low to mid-20s. MRNY has been hit as well, and is now one of the cheapest of all the YM funds, at around $2.60 at the moment.

This is reverse split territory but supposedly YMax has said they will not be doing a reverse split on MRNY. I'm unsure if that's true or rumor, but it's widely believed by several people. Last year they did a reverse split on TSLY, the fund that focuses on TSLA, and it was just devastated. I think that scared off a lot of investors. It was certainly a wakeup call as to just how risky these things are.

Anyway, on the plus side MRNY still delivers a monthly divvy between 18 and 23 cents so far this year. At today's price and this month's dividend, 3000 shares could be picked up for $7,860 yielding a divvy of $548. If the divvy goes back into the mid-20 cents range, the payout would be in the mid-700s.

So, MRNY is tempting. But its price has been on a terrible decline all year, from the low 20s to as low as $2.30 during all the turmoil. OTOH, if Moderna's fortunes improve, and it's a good company I think at some point they will, MRNY's price could bounce too.

Deciding soon, within a couple weeks or so.

Doesn't the decay combined with the yield wreck you on taxes? You can't realize the decay loss unless you sell?

Yukon Cornelius said:

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Doesn't the decay combined with the yield wreck you on taxes? You can't realize the decay loss unless you sell?

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Yup. Not only that, if I understand correctly, selling at a loss does not affect taxes still owed on dividends. These divvies are taxed as ordinary income too.

But my goal is to generate considerable dividends. I'll increase my quarterly payments accordingly.

I think that's correct. Why not something like Schd? I would hate to see my principle slowly evaporating for tbe sake of a little higher yield.

Yukon Cornelius said:

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I think that's correct. Why not something like Schd? I would hate to see my principle slowly evaporating for tbe sake of a little higher yield.

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One idea is to invest YMax divvies into something more stable and less hair raising like JEPI or SCHD.

How you like jepi? I've been kind of looking into that one too

Yukon Cornelius said:

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How you like jepi? I've been kind of looking into that one too

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I used to really like it. Haven't looked at it in a while.

You been doing dividend plays for a while?

I hold quite a few dividend-focused ETFs, including several YieldMax ones (there is a separate thread discussing them specifically). I do not recommend using my risk-dispersion "create my own fund of funds" market basket approach for these, but it's where I am, now. In interest of brevity, I'll give my current outlook on each, along with Schwab's indicated current dividend payout rate:

CHY (12.2%) - long-term holding of 15 years I'm quite happy with, despite flat capital gain. HOLD
LADR (9.1%) - nice capital gain over my 5 year holding period. HOLD
VICI (5.4%) - new holding, pleased so far - may buy more. BUY
WHF (16.7%) - 10+ year holding, keep waiting for it to implode, but it's been great. HOLD.
NVDY (121.8%) - See my detailed review on the YieldMax thread. HOLD
AMLP (7.9%) - New holding - too early to tell much of anything. I bought because it's a MLP with no K-1. HOLD
DX (17.3%) - 11+ year hold - textbook example of time-based decay. SELL
XYLD (12.9%) - held almost 2 years with little decay. HOLD
IEP (23.8%) - who knew that Carl Icahn lost his magical powers as he aged? This is really a hedge fund, not a dividend play. STRONG SELL
JEPQ (11.5%) - 2+ years with no complaints. BUY
JEPI (7.9%) - same as above - JP Morgan is able to avoid much decay, it appears. HOLD
OHI (7.0%) - Health care REIT, bought 8 years ago as industry diversification. HOLD
PEX (15.0%) - another hedge fund, bought 18 months ago. OK total return, but generally would not recommend. SELL
CLOI (6.5%) - new holding - too early to tell. HOLD
5 more YieldMax below - enter at your own risk!
AMZY (56.8%) - Still like the premise (AMZN is my biggest share holding), and it's performed decently. BUY
GOOY (46.1%) - tough call. Not as much juice as other tech YM funds. HOLD or SELL
MSTY (146.6%) - As indicated above, a total crapshoot. Can not recommend. SELL
CRSH (97.5%) - has been great during TSLA's downturn. I am flipping toward TSLY at some point soon. SELL
ULTY (165.2%) - Overall yield champ. Can not recommend, but will hold on to it a while longer. SELL

As you can see, I have diversified my income sources broadly (please recommend sectors you think I should add or substitute). Learning => definitely use these in an IRA as opposed to after-tax money, if you can, due to the tax implications noted above. Yes - in YieldMax especially, I'm tech-heavy, but doing so purposely to get paid for the volatility in these names.

techno_ag: Loved your commentary above. A suggestion - express your results in terms of either per-share or % return for a couple reasons: 1) It's no one else's business how much capital you invest, and 2) It's MUCH easier to analyze for readers.

Good advice. Went back and edited.

Here's my latest ruminations on the dividend ETFs I've got and have been considering.

MSTY is my biggest, and as I noted last time it sank with the turmoil earlier in the month, and it sank upon payout like they all do. I manually reinvested for more shares and did not feel bad about doing that. Good move, it's gone up since then.

MSTY is the big kahuna in covered call single share focused YieldMax ETFs, and people are still enthused enough about it to keep the price up, at least for now. NAV erosion? Not here. On paper, I'm doing quite well. Next payout is May 9, and I will probably manually drip again. It's expected to be $1.34/share which is fantastic, but considered low for MSTY which has in the past gotten above $4/share at least once.

My next holding is SMCY. As I've said, I like this one, which makes covered calls on SMCI. I don't have near as many shares. It started the year handing out around $2 in divvies. This month it came in at $1.50. It too is schedule to pay out on May 9. It's predicted to be about $1/share this time.

Unlike MSTY, SMCY has lost considerable value in the turmoil and has not bounced back. I am tempted to increase my holdings and lower my costs. But I'm also interested in starting some positions in other ETFs, too.

YETH - this is a Roundhill product and I think I like it. It focuses on Ether and pays monthly. Like everything else, divvies have gone down lately but I think it's well-run and perhaps worth grabbing some at these depressed prices. I think it will remain lower priced in general because most people look for Bitcoin ETFs instead of Ether. But if it continues to pay well, maybe I'm willing to buy it rather than a comparable Bitcoin one. Although BITO is kinda cheap too. Google suggests the next payout for YETH is estimated to come in at $2.49/share the end of this month.

PLTW is another Roundhill product focusing on Palintir. It's a weekly payer which likes to flirt with 50 cents/share every week, although it's only crested that mark once in its short life. It's expensive, like most weeklies are, but it's currently cheaper than some of the YieldMax weeklies it competes with. On the 7th it dropped down into the $24 range but has since recovered to about $32 tonight.

LFGY - I talked about this one last time. I like it. I want it. It's a weekly, playing cc's on a crypto and tech portfolio and has the YieldMax reputation of strong payouts. But, it has reduced dividends lately like everybody else and has not gone above 50 cents/share any week since Feb. It spiked in price today with everything else and is sitting at about $36 tonight. Do want.

USOY- this is a new one I found that looks interesting. It's a Defiance product focusing nominally on oil with a monthly dividend generally hovering around 80 cents, although it's gone as high as a $1/share and as low as 60 cents. From what I can tell it seems to be doing CC's on T-bills more than anything else, with only a fraction of its assets in USO. Currently in the $10 and change range, it's interesting and probably a better play than MRNY which I talked about last time. It would add some diversity to my tech-heavy focus. Maybe if oil ever gets out of the doldrums again it would go up in value. Or maybe not. It started life in the 20s last year and has sunk nonstop to its current level.

YMAX Schedule D dividends announced. My MSTY came out big at 2.37/share. SMCY was also not bad at 1.41/share. SMCY NAV shrank with the hits to SMCI recently though.

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/05/07/3075913/0/en/YieldMax-ETFs-Announces-Distributions-on-MSTY-LFGY-ULTY-SMCY-and-Others.html

Coming up to another round of purchasing opportunity for high dividend yielding etfs, so here are my current thoughts, and considerations for anyone interested. They're probably worth what you paid for them, lol.

MSTY and SMCY are my biggest holdings. Looking to drip probably, at least with MSTY. SMCY has added some nice income last month after I boosted my shares.

Looking for a new acquisition and as mentioned I'd love a weekly. I've put several in a spreadsheet and watched the results this month. Currently, the highest bang for the buck is MST at 0.335 which is phenomenal for a weekly. It's a Defiance product, not YieldMax. The catch is that was their first payout. We'll see what happens this week. Probably not going to buy into it for now, just observe. It closed Friday at 17.92.

Next up is TSW, which is a Roundhill ETF that paid out 50 cents on the 19th, 43 cents on the 12th, and 53 cents on the 4th. Impressive. They are expensive, though, closing Friday at 40.29. They debuted in late Feb. and have bounced around on price, hitting $26 in late April. Keeping an eye on it, probably not buying unless it dips hard again, then it might tempt me. Good distros, but I don't know how comfortable I am with the underlying. I know YieldMax's TSLY has done well over several months, though, so maybe I just need to investigate that more to increase my comfort level. I know these options ETFs don't need the best stocks, just volatile ones, and I guess Tesla has been pretty volatile.

Third on the list is ULTY, a YieldMax ETF that has undergone a lot of changes. It focuses on a basket of stocks and they decided they would toss things in or throw things out as needed. Drastic NAV erosion halted around that time, along with a switch to weekly payouts starting in mid-March. They've hovered around $6 since then, taking brief dips in the $5 range and maintaining weekly payouts in the 10 cent range. This one, I think, at the moment I like the best and as we move into June it's probably top on my next ETF acquisition list. I'm thinking the NAV hopefully stays stable going forward, and am willing to open a position at this point, unless something changes in the next couple days.

So, where is LFGY you might ask? I've talked about them before, and I still like them. They're not performing as well as these others when you factor in current share price and dividend payout. Last week they yielded 49 cents, which is good. But their share price closed Friday at $39.45. For the same amount of money in ULTY, I would get almost 25 percent more in div payouts.

TL/DR: probably buying ULTY soon.

What is MST?

Here have been my picks for a long term hold. Geared around value appreciation and respectable dividends. Will drip for a decade or so.

FDVV
SCHD
FUTY
FENY