Income-ETF education
Short, plain-English explainers for income investors. The durable library behind the newsletter — how these funds actually work, where the yield comes from, and the traps the marketing skips.
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Intro
3 explainers Start here — the foundations Intro Topic 18
The Yield Trap: Why the Biggest Number Is Rarely the Best Fund
Your eye goes straight to the biggest yield. But the highest-yielding fund in a category is rarely the one that builds the most wealth, and behavioral biases are why we still click.
Intro Topic 1
Covered-Call ETFs, Explained Without the Jargon
A fund holding the same kind of stocks as the S&P 500 can pay eight times the dividend. Here is where that money actually comes from, and what you give up for it.
Intro Topic 5
Does Cadence Matter? Weekly vs. Monthly vs. Quarterly Income ETFs
Getting paid 52 times a year feels better than four. The math — and the operating model underneath these funds — says the cadence barely moves your return.
Core
12 explainers The working knowledge Core Topic 66
Your Fund Just Cut Its Payout: The Anatomy of a Distribution Cut
YieldMax's ULTY cut its weekly payout 10.6% while reporting a 100%-income distribution. A cut and a clean payment at once — here's how to read what it means.
Core Topic 61
JEPI and JEPQ Have Successors. Here's What ROCQ and ROCY Actually Change.
Same managers, same price as JEPI and JEPQ. What changes is the options structure and the tax treatment — a little less yield now for more upside kept.
Core Topic 54
The Durable-Fund Screen: Ranking High-Yield ETFs by Risk-Adjusted Return, Not Yield
Rank high-yield ETFs by their headline payout and you'll reliably sort them worst to best. Here's the five-signal screen that ranks them by what investors actually keep.
Advanced
1 explainer Niche structures & deep cuts
Newsletter
The Current
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