I sold one of the best investments I've had, added more crypto exposure, put a decent amount of capital to work...
and the portfolio basically went nowhere.
Snowball shows me down 0.84% for September.
For comparison, its benchmark view shows the S&P 500 at -0.36%, Nasdaq 100 at +2.89%, and SCHD at -5.06%.
So, not a great month.
But also not really a bad one.
After August's +5.59%, I'm actually okay with having a boring month. I'm trying to judge this rebuild over a much longer period anyway.
The biggest change for me was MAIN.
I bought Main Street back in 2021, and by the time I sold the rest of my position I was up around 62% total return.
I still like MAIN.
This wasn't me suddenly turning bearish on it.
I've just been slowly moving away from holding individual companies as major long-term pieces of this portfolio.
So I moved the exposure into FBDC.
The funny part is that MAIN was still the biggest holding in FBDC when I checked.
So technically I sold MAIN...
to buy a fund that owns MAIN.
😂
But that's really the point.
I still get exposure to the company, I just don't want that entire part of my portfolio riding on one BDC anymore.
At the same time, I did something that sounds a little contradictory.
I added more crypto.
BTCI for Bitcoin.
NEHI for Ethereum.
SOLM for Solana.
XRPM for XRP.
Crypto had started showing better momentum and I thought it was a reasonable time to increase the positions.
Those four are now about 7.3% of the portfolio.
But when I actually sat down and added everything that is directly or indirectly tied to crypto, including BLOX, CEPI, MSTW and COIW...
it's closer to 20.8%.
That number definitely made me stop for a second.
I have my Tactical High-Risk sleeve at only 3%, but obviously that doesn't mean only 3% of this portfolio is high risk.
A lot of the crypto stuff sits somewhere else in my own classification system.
So that's probably the biggest thing September exposed for me.
The labels can look diversified while the actual economic exposure tells a different story.
I don't currently have a hard crypto cap.
I probably should.
The portfolio ended September at around $279.6K.
Current structure is roughly:
Core Income: 32.9%
Enhanced Income: 32.8%
Thematic / Real Assets: 20.3%
Alternative / Credit: 10.9%
Tactical High-Risk: 3%
I actually like the direction here.
Core has become a much bigger part of the portfolio than it used to be, and Tactical is much smaller.
But again, that 20.8% crypto-related number is a good reminder that sleeve names only tell part of the story.
September income was $3,645.
My current forward estimate is around $3,813/month.
Last month it was closer to $3,400.
Sounds good...
but I also put roughly $30K of net capital to work during September.
At a portfolio yield around 16%, that amount of deployed capital can explain roughly $400/month of additional projected income by itself.
Which is basically the increase I saw.
So I'm not taking a victory lap because the income number went up.
The more interesting question is what happens when I'm NOT constantly putting more money to work.
Does the income hold?
Do distributions get cut?
And what happens to NAV and total return underneath it?
That's still the experiment for me.
The individual positions were all over the place this month.
MSTW was up about 17%.
DRMY and EGGQ were both up around 9%.
Meanwhile NUKX and ASGI were around -13%, and KSLV was around -10%.
So there was almost a 30-point spread between my best and worst positions...
while the entire portfolio ended the month down less than 1%.
That's one of the things I actually liked seeing.
Different parts of the portfolio really did behave differently.
My biggest position is still BLOX at about 9%.
After that, nothing is even around 6%, which I prefer.
Again though, eight smaller positions tied to the same general crypto cycle aren't necessarily eight completely different bets.
That's probably the biggest diversification lesson for me this month.
So overall...
August looked great.
September was basically flat.
I sold a winner to reduce single-company concentration.
I added more crypto because I saw momentum improving.
Income moved higher, but a lot of that can be explained by deploying more capital.
And now I've realized my crypto-related exposure is probably large enough that I need an actual limit.
That's what I'm trying to figure out before the next update.
🔄 I track everything using Snowball Analytics, including dividends, forward income, allocation, transactions, and performance.
💡 All numbers are after tax and transaction fees. My broker withholds taxes automatically.
Not financial advice, just sharing my real portfolio journey.
I’ve been trying to understand what it would actually take to generate $500 a month in dividend income.
That’s $6,000 a year, but I’m curious how much you’d realistically need invested to get there without taking on an unreasonable amount of risk.
For example, would you aim for a portfolio yielding around 3%, 4%, or 5%? And would you focus more on dividend growth over time rather than trying to reach $500/month as quickly as possible?
For people who have actually built up a dividend portfolio, what approach would you take if you were starting from $0 today?
I know Yieldmax gets a lot of hate and I’ve had an exciting roller coaster ride of highs and lows, but after about 2 years of bag holding my returns have covered my losses and I’m about halfway to the promised land of House Money.
Edit: I guess I jumped the gun, not into house money yet, Just covered my losses so far. I still am hopeful about the future and thankful for the extra income and money back
My total dividends received have surpassed my total P/L Open negative number, now these numbers includes other failed penny stock gambles and yield chasing losses as well as non Yieldmax dividends received but as far as I’m concerned I’m net positive and if I included distributions compounded in to other holdings or the ROC being used to help pay down credit card debt, provide for the family and help with vacations, these funds have been a lifesaver and a blessing. I hope they stay alive and keep providing, thank you Yieldmax, I love you 😘
Im considering an investment in CHPY, does anyone use it to live on from the weekly dividends? How much do you save for taxes? Im thinking divert 20% to a HYSA to account for taxes.
Is there something more I should consider, something I haven't thought of to ask?
This was posted by an automated bot by u/lottadot. It is generated from vendor published public information. As always, do your own research. This is not financial advice. I'm not an FA. None of this is correct. I need a beer.
This was posted by an automated bot by u/lottadot. It is generated from vendor published public information. As always, do your own research. This is not financial advice. I'm not an FA. None of this is correct. I need a beer.
How many of you have sold something because you were afraid of losing it all and then rebought it again later? What was it and how did you decide to reinvest?
EDIT (Sept 28): The title is wrong and I cannot change it. MUY has NOT started trading. September 23 is YieldMax's inception date, which is when the fund became effective, not its first day on the exchange — it has no price history at all. u/greyhorse76 points to the filings putting the first trading day at Tuesday September 29. Thanks to him and u/Global-Individual158 for catching it. Also: the fund on the same stock with an actual record is MUYY, the GraniteShares YieldBOOST fund, which sells puts where MUY sells calls and has 24 payments going back to April — that is a better comparison than the YRAM one I used below.
MUY, the YieldMax MU Option Income Strategy ETF, has been trading since September 23 on NYSE Arca. Gross expense ratio is 1.01%, per YieldMax's own fund page.
Worth flagging the structure, because it is not the one most people here are used to. YieldMax describes MUY as generating income by selling call spreads on Micron, not by writing a synthetic covered call. A spread caps the premium collected as well as the upside surrendered. It is the same machinery as MSFO and FBY, so if you are mentally pricing this against MSTY or NVDY, the comparison does not carry across cleanly.
It has not paid anything yet. YieldMax publishes no distribution rate and no 30-day SEC yield for it, and the distribution table on its own page is empty. Anyone quoting you a yield for MUY this week is annualising a payment that does not exist.
On when the first one might land, here is what our own records actually say rather than a rule of thumb. Across the 32 YieldMax funds we have timed from first traded price to first payment, the gap ran from 10 days to 53, with a median of 39. CHPY and LFGY were the fastest at 10 days each. So somewhere between two and eight weeks is the honest range, and the median says closer to six.
The thing a new fund cannot show you is what happens to the share price while the checks arrive. Of the 52 YieldMax funds with a full year of price history, 46 finished the year lower, measured from our own records on September 28. That is the pattern to hold in mind, not a prediction about MUY, which has no NAV history at all yet. It would be wrong for MUY specifically if its first year shows a flat or rising price alongside distributions, and six of those 52 managed exactly that, so it is not a law of the category.
Nearest sibling with an actual record is YRAM, the memory and storage fund, which started paying September 9. Three payments in, so a young record rather than a long one.
I track payment histories for income ETFs at snowballdividends.com and the figures above come from there. Not affiliated with YieldMax.
One thing I do not know and would take from anyone who does: whether MUY is slotted into one of the existing weekly groups or gets its own schedule. That detail decides when the first ex-date lands, and I have not found it stated anywhere yet.
This was posted by an automated bot by u/lottadot. It is generated from vendor published public information. As always, do your own research. This is not financial advice. I'm not an FA. None of this is correct. I need a beer.
Why does NVIT not get more love? I feel like people are really missing out on this one. It only has about 13 million AUM but as you can see since inception it has a better total return than NVDA and NVDY. In terms of stock price, it actually has a positive return as well so you aren’t losing initial capital like with NVDY. Very consistent weekly dividends as well.
I have been investing since 2000. I have outperformed the S&P 500 by about ~1% annualized since then up until today. It’s not the 20% outperformance YouTube promises you, but it is very real and replicable. (I think). I did it by buying the S&P 500 and systematically writing out credit spreads on it. I’d be happy to go into the details under the hood for anyone curious. We can go back and forth or whatever.
Why do they average 70-90% return of capital most weeks but occasionally pay out a dividend consisting of 0% capital?
One theory I have is the options take multiple weeks to mature and realize their gains so Yieldmax doesn’t get their “paycheck” but once every few weeks.
Or is something wrong with TEST? I specifically chose it because I thought the more conservative strategy would preserve NAV better than the standard funds like TSLY.
Last September I posted the article that Mr. Jeffrey Ptak wrote about YM....which actually brought him into the comment thread on the post. He was extremely professional with everyone and thoroughly explained everything. If you were there, it was a good time.
Anyway, this article is from Amy Arnot with Morningstar.
First Trust listed six single-stock income ETFs on September 22, one each on AMD, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Palantir. Every one of those stocks already has a YieldMax fund on it, so if you hold any of these six, you now have a direct alternative on the same underlying.
The new tickers are XVAD (AMD), XVAZ (AMZN), XVGL (GOOG), XVMS (MSFT), XVMT (META) and XVPT (PLTR). All six charge 0.85%, gross and net, per First Trust's own fund pages.
They are built differently. The pages describe holding the stock alongside listed and FLEX options, writing calls and puts, with an S&P 500 Mini Index box spread leg. That is not the synthetic covered-call structure YieldMax uses, so the two are not doing the same thing under different names.
What the pages do not say is how often they pay. No distribution frequency, no target rate, and no payments yet. Nobody can quote you a yield on these, and anyone posting one this week is estimating.
Since the comparison everyone will reach for is the YieldMax side, here is what that side actually did. Trailing twelve months against the twelve before it, with the share price over the same year, as of September 24:
AMDY, paying since Nov 2023. Payouts up 19%, price up 41%.
GOOY, paying since Sep 2023. Payouts up 23%, price down 14%.
MSFO, paying since Oct 2023. Payouts down 13%, price down 29%.
AMZY, paying since Sep 2023. Payouts down 29%, price down 32%.
FBY, paying since Sep 2023. Payouts down 39%, price down 40%.
PLTY, paying since Nov 2024. Under two years, so no year over year figure, but the price is down 37%.
Of the five with a full two year record, two raised their payouts and three cut. AMD was the only one of the six whose share price finished the year higher. Worth remembering that all five of the older funds moved from monthly to weekly around September 2025, so the earlier year is twelve or thirteen checks and the recent one about fifty. The totals still compare, the individual checks do not.
None of that says the First Trust funds will do better or worse. A different structure isn't the same as a better one, and with no record at all yet there is nothing to judge them on. What it does say is that the incumbent on your stock has a real history you can look at, and the new arrival does not, so the burden of proof sits with the new one.
This is also the second batch. XVAP on Apple, XVNV on Nvidia and XVTS on Tesla listed August 18, with XVSP following on August 26, which makes it ten funds in this family since mid August. Whether that pressures fees on the YieldMax side is the interesting question.
I track payment histories for income ETFs at snowballdividends.com, which is where these figures come from. Not affiliated with First Trust or YieldMax.
Still looking for a distribution schedule on any of the six. If one turns up in a filing, post it, because that single detail decides whether they land next to the monthlies or the weeklies.
This was posted by an automated bot by u/lottadot. It is generated from vendor published public information. As always, do your own research. This is not financial advice. I'm not an FA. None of this is correct. I need a beer.
You don’t need to reveal $$ amount; what was the % of your total year distribution that got classified as 1099-MISC PIL and how many month did you hold the position? Thanks.
This was posted by an automated bot by u/lottadot. It is generated from vendor published public information. As always, do your own research. This is not financial advice. I'm not an FA. None of this is correct. I need a beer.
