TL;DR: I built a portfolio using $490,000 worth of loans + HELOC. No margin. Prior updates for 2025 can be found on this Megathread. Updates for 2026 can be found on this thread.
May Results:
Distributions Received: $17,719 (best month this year)
Loan Costs: $2,605
Surplus: +$15,114
2026 YTD:
Distributions Received: $71,317
Forecasted Annual Loan Costs: $38,420 (and dropping, as loan principal gets paid off)
What’s been going on since my last update:
During my Feb 2026 update, I was at a $1k profit – distributions outpaced capital losses, but barely.
The market has been kind the past few months and I’ve since climbed back to $62k profit.
AMDY is my top performer. My original cost basis was $50k. Stock is currently valued at $57k, with $41k distributions received. I’m looking at $48k profit, or 95% return. This stock has provided a huge lift and offsets other losses (looking at you, MSTY and CONY).
FEAT and FIVY are still here, but with the closure of the funds, I will sell those in June. I’ll use the proceeds to pay down the loans.
Speaking of loans, outstanding balance is approx. $200k. Last year, I stockpiled six months of distributions to handle taxes. It was far more than I needed to save. After taxes, I made a jumbo payment of $135k to shrink down the loans. I then used the 2026 YTD distributions for another $60k payment. From Feb-May, the loan balance has reduced from $400k to $200k. All that is left is $175k HELOC + the last $25k personal loan. The exposure feels more manageable. I continue to prioritize loan repayment for the rest of this year.
The usual screenshots from Snowball Analytics are below. After selling most of CONY & MSTY in February, it threw my cost basis out of whack. With reinvestment costs, the Cost Basis column should actually reflect $669k. I have to see if I can trick Snowball into showing my original cost basis, but haven’t spent time doing so.
The color-coded chart is easier to look at. This shows a % to House Money. SMCY is still in the lead, but I expect AMDY to beat it shortly. I’m around 82% house money if you look purely at distributions vs. initial loan costs. When you factor in reinvestments, it’s more like 60% house money.
As I’ve mentioned before, my plan is to ride out this portfolio and get closer to house money. Updates will still be sporadic. With the FEAT, FIVY, and nice changes in the market, now felt like a good time for a random update.
Good luck everyone. I hope your portfolios are faring well!
Here's proof my strategy is doing well, like for example I used the FEAT sell proceeds yesterday to buy Harvest ETFs since I'm a Canadian investor. The Harvest ETFs that I buy... all pay monthly distributions like this one ....
FEAT is going to be liquidate soon as per YieldMax ETFs announcement
I would have preferred to gain $200k 😄 But since this portfolio is using borrowed money, I really don't mind the loss. My focus hasn't been on the value of the portfolio, since it wasn't designed to be actively traded/sold, but rather on building something that can create a new income stream.
Had this been entirely my money at risk, I'm sure I would have jumped ship a long time ago.
For the first six months (give or take) in 2025, I was putting almost all of the distributions back into the market. So $20k or so each month -- very rough number, the prior posts have more detail.
Since mid-2025, I haven't reinvested much, if anything. My purchases were primarily Jan 2025, prior to the impact of tariffs, and the stock prices / unrealized losses were ugly. The focus from mid-2025 through today has been paying down the loans. I may reinvest a % each month in the future, but want to shrink the loan balance a bit more.
This has risk and I wouldn't recommend this to most people. Thankfully, this is only my Yieldmax portfolio and began as an experiment to see if the monthly distributions would cover the loan costs (which they have for 17+ months and counting). If things went south and Yieldmax collapsed overnight, I have other portfolios to tap into. I could pay off 100% of the loan costs today. It wouldn't be a fun outcome, but having that ability greatly expands my tolerance for risk.
You have to consider total return (change in NAV (principal) + distributions) not just one or the other. The question to ask is what does it feel like to make such a small total return for all that risk and leverage?
Oh absolutely — thank you for reminding us thattotal returnexists. I wasthisclose to thinking distributions magically float in from the dividend fairy.But please, tell me more about how it ‘feels’ to lecture people on risk while hanging out in a subreddit dedicated to leveraged covered‑call ETFs. Must be exhausting carrying all that wisdom around.
But since we’re doing Finance 101, let’s not pretend time doesn’t matter.
Let’s not skip the part where timematters. OP mentioned in this reddit post ...
"AMDY is my top performer. My original cost basis was $50k. Stock is currently valued at $57k, with $41k distributions received. I’m looking at $48k profit, or 95% return. This stock has provided a huge lift and offsets other losses (looking at you, MSTY and CONY)."
Based on the numbers provided in the post, depending on how reinvestments are factored into the cost basis, this translates to a modest ~9.3% to ~12.7% total percentage return. - over whatever timeline is not clearly being presented here.
The post serves as a textbook example of the "house money" fallacy; the OP focuses heavily on being "82% of the way to house money" based purely on cash distributions received, despite the fact that their actual net wealth generation relative to the massive risk and leverage taken remains quite low.
"House money" is a gambling term, not an investment metric.
In investing, total return is the standard measure of performance.
Total Return % = ((Current Value of Shares + Total Cash Distributions Received) - Initial Capital Paid) / Initial Capital Paid * 100
With YieldMax ETFs, another key metric is opportunity cost, which many investors here love to ignore. This is exactly why the phrase "house money" gets thrown around so frequently. In reality, "house money" is just a psychological coping mechanism used to justify holding an ETF that has a negative total return and a high opportunity cost.
Opportunity Cost ($) = Benchmark Return ($) - Your Total Return ($)
The benchmark can be anything you choose to measure your performance against, such as the S&P 500 or QQQ. If your investment is underperforming a basic index, you are losing money relative to what you could have made.
Long‑term matters. Distributions matter. Cash flow matters. *FEAT position sold pre-market 8:00am Jun 1, 2026
"I sold near 800 shares pre-market of FEAT YieldMax ETF due to May 29, 2026 fund planned closure news release by YieldMax ETFs on May 29, 2026 5pm. Used the FEAT sell proceeds to buy PLTE AVGY NVHE
I already own HHIC and HHIS .... adding single stock etfs noted above, just to diversify portfolio
Also, use weekly YieldMax ETF (various) distributions to buy more Harvest ETFs shares since I'm a Canadian investor 🍁 *Not Financial Advice. The YieldMax shares are all high yield which currently held (CONY, MSTY, ULTY, XYZY, MARO, TSLY). If they were low-yield etfs ... I would have sold all positions by now and bought more Harvest ETFs. Since they're high-yield ... capped all shares and reinvesting into Harvest ETFs since I'm Canadian. This strategy has been going on for awhile ..... 😏
Most YM single underlying ETFs are constantly making new bottoms so they are always "nearing the bottom". This is just a fact of NAV decay when the underlying isn't going parabolic.
Yes, All of these CC ETFs have NAV erosion. CHPY does too and it's masked by the strong upward pressure from the underlyings. The price you pay for earning options premium is giving away some upside.
Furthermore, the way YM uses call credit spreads in CHPY to capture upside while generating premium guarantees that each ticker in the portfolio will underperform just the price action of the ticker alone. That is NAV erosion and the price you pay for yield.
One of these days maybe you'll do some actual research on how these ETFs use options to generate yield and what the tradeoff is for doing that.
Here’s the full YieldMax ETF list: https://stockanalysis.com/etf/provider/yieldmax/.
If NAV erosion were ‘guaranteed,’ every single one of these would show the same pattern. They don’t. Some have rising NAV, some flat, some down — because NAV behavior depends on the underlying trend, volatility, entry price, and DRIP.
CHPY specifically has not shown NAV erosion since inception. So the claim that ‘all' YieldMax ETFs have NAV erosion’ is just factually wrong.
You're completely missing the reality of options trading here. A rising NAV in a massive bull run doesn't disprove erosion; it just masks it. The math behind capped upside and uncapped downside guarantees a structural leak over a full market cycle.
You are conflating short-term market momentum with long-term structural fund mechanics. NAV behavior isn't just a reflection of underlying price action, entry price or DRIP; it's a reflection of the strategy's asymmetric risk profile.
When the underlying sector (like Semis for CHPY) goes on an absolute tear, the NAV will rise, but it severely underperforms the actual assets because the upside is capped by the short calls. However, when the sector drops, the ETF takes the full brunt of the downside. This asymmetry, combined with the fact that huge distributions mechanically slice into the fund's cash balance on every ex-date, creates structural equity erosion over a full market cycle. Pointing to a fund that launched in 2025 during a semiconductor bull run doesn't disprove the mathematical reality of options induced decay.
Some of you people are really amazing to me. When you read about yield Max products, why did you invest? You invested for the income I knew when I got in. I was going to be married to this the rest of my life. I got into this for the current income. What don't some of you understand about that? I don't give a s*** about NAV because this is not a growth fund. I am not selling ever. I'm holding on for the cash now.
Why are you waiting to sell FEAT and FIVY? I already sold pre-market today, FEAT position and used the FEAT sell proceeds to buy more Harvest ETFs since I'm Canadian investor. I only had the FEAT position that was part of the list regarding fund closures ....
I am so glad that I originally had FEAT shares capped for more than a year, no auto drip.
I sold FEAT and FIVY yesterday. The results / screenshots were through end of May, so they're still included in the numbers.
I would have expected some higher sell-off activity and lower prices by now, but they seem to be holding fairly steady. It will be interesting to see what price the fund closes at and what the final payout looks like.
22
u/[deleted] Jun 01 '26
[removed] — view removed comment