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YieldMax NVIDIA (NVDY) has $1.3B, up 52% from last year, and Tesla (TSLY) has $950M, up 53%. Coinbase (CONY) has $398M, down 30%, and MicroStrategy (MSTY) has $1B, down 45%.
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High volatility is currently driving the spread, but funds are sacrificing a portion of participation by selling call options, and NAV decay has exceeded returns for Coinbase and MicroStrategy ETFs.
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Some ETFs pay you more in dividends a year from now than the shares cost today. This seems like a big deal until you understand why it’s happening.
NVDY, TSLY, CONY, and MSTY are all part of the YieldMax series of single stock option income ETFs. Each sells options on a single high-volatility reference stock (NVIDIA, Tesla, Coinbase, and MicroStrategy, respectively) and distributes the accumulated premium as a weekly dividend. Income is real. But that’s the destruction that can come with it.
Each of these funds uses a synthetic covered call structure. Instead of owning the underlying stock directly, the fund holds a combination of call options and short positions that simulate stock ownership, then sells the call options against that synthetic position to collect a premium. This premium is passed on to shareholders as income.
READ: The analyst named NVIDIA in 2010 Just naming his top 10 AI stocks
The amount collected depends largely on how volatile the underlying stock is. When implied volatility is high, the option premium is rich, and the spread increases. The VIX, a broad measure of market-wide volatility expectations, closed at 29.49 on March 6, 2026, up 58% from the previous month. Such an environment increases the premiums these funds can collect. But the VIX is mean-reverting, and when volatility normalizes, its dispersion decreases with it.
Structured trading is straightforward: by selling call options, the fund limits its upside exposure to the reference stock. If NVIDIA grows significantly, NVDY captures only a fraction of that momentum. This fund is designed to turn volatility into income, not to track the price appreciation of underlying stocks.
NVDY launched in May 2023 and has grown approximately $1.3 billion in assets. The expense ratio is 1.09%, which is suitable for an actively managed options strategy.
NVDY distributions have changed dramatically since their inception. By mid-2024, monthly payouts have risen from $1.20 to $2.62 per share — a reflection of NVIDIA’s explosive volatility during the AI boom. Beginning in 2026, the fund transitioned to weekly payouts of $0.09 to $0.12, as volatility normalized and the distribution schedule was reset.
Share prices tell a much shorter story than most high-yield ETFs. NVDY is trading around $13.46 today, up nearly 52% over the past year. This price appreciation, combined with earnings per share, reflects the fundamental strength in NVIDIA stock over the same period. Until the date in 2026, the share price is almost flat.
TSLY launched in November 2022 and has approximately $950 million in assets. Its portfolio is made up almost entirely of Tesla calls and places options across multiple expiration dates and strike prices, which is exactly what you’d expect from a fund built to accumulate Tesla’s notoriously high volatility.
Weekly distributions beginning in 2026 continue to range from $0.29 to $0.37 per payout. Shares are around $31, up about 53% from last year. Year to date in 2026, the price has fallen by about 8%, which is significant because this decline accounts for some of the revenue collected.
Tesla’s volatility is the main feature here. Stocks are subject to large swings in both directions, which keep options premiums high and spreads relatively generous. The flip side is that a continued decline in Tesla stock will pull the synthetic position lower, reducing NAV even as the dividend continues.
CONY is the most volatile fund on this list by the mean margin, which makes sense given its reference asset. Coinbase stock moves with crypto sentiment, and that means CONY’s NAV can move quickly in either direction.
The fund launched in August 2023 with about $398 million in assets today. In 2024, monthly distributions ranged from $1.01 to $2.79 per payment. Beginning in 2026, weekly payments ranged from $0.22 to $0.41.
Price action clearly shows the risk of volatility. In the past year, CONY’s share price has fallen nearly 30% to nearly $30. Year to date in 2026, the price has fallen by nearly 15%. Investors who held CONY during this period collected significant distributions, but the NAV decay partially wiped out the returns – a clear example of how a fund can pay generous distributions while still delivering negative total returns.
MSTY was launched in February 2024 and has approximately $1 billion in assets. MicroStrategy has a large Bitcoin treasury, which means that MSTY is essentially an option to profit on the sentiment of Bitcoin. The implied volatility on MSTR is the highest of any large-cap stock, which has historically produced the largest volatility.
MSTY once paid a monthly distribution of $4.42 per share, a figure that made it one of the highest-yielding ETFs on the market. But that income has come at a cost — as of early 2026, those distributions have been reduced to weekly payments of $0.30 to $0.43, and the share price has fallen about 45% over the past year to around $24, showing how NAV erosion can quietly undermine even the most generous payment schedule. This is the steepest NAV decay in this group, and it represents the risk of yield tracking on a single company-linked fund whose value is driven almost entirely by a volatile asset price.
The catch with all these funds is that the distribution alone doesn’t tell you whether you made money or not. What matters is the total return: the share price change and the accumulated earnings. CONY and MSTY have seen their shares decline significantly over the past year, meaning investors should collect enough in dividends to come out ahead. NVDY and TSLY saw price appreciation in the same period, which changes the math significantly.
Another benefit is that distributions are not guaranteed and traditional dividends are not. They come from options premiums, which rise and fall with volatility. When volatility falls, as it did in late 2025 when the VIX briefly fell to 13.47, the spread narrows. The current elevated VIX environment is promoting payouts right now, but this environment will not last indefinitely.
Each of these funds is linked to a different reference asset with its own volatility profile. NVDY is associated with NVIDIA and AI infrastructure sensing. TSLY is tied to Tesla’s historically high volatility. CONY and MSTY are linked to crypto-related assets, which historically produce the highest spreads but also the steepest NAV decays. In all four cases, total return—share price change and accumulated earnings—is the only absolute measure of whether the strategy has delivered value.
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