070 - 1 Year Of YieldMax ETF Performance And How We Reduce Their Risk To Zero

More and more people are learning about Yieldmax ETFs. We couldn't pass up experimenting because of the high yields these kick off.

Yes, these ETFs are sensational but they can be quite risky if you get into the wrong ones or at the wrong price. We're sure you've seen the TSLY horror stories.

We took the plunge over a year ago and have been in them ever since. So now we want to share our experience and strategy.

Tim's put together the results from a year of data which you can see here.

He also figured out the patterns of many of the YieldMax ETFs and has come up with a way to take the risk of investing in these completely to zero.

See what’s possible with yield max ETFs and how you can turn them into a cash generating machine in your portfolio.

Current list of YieldMax ETFs can be found here on their site. 

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**DISCLAIMER**
Ticker metrics change as markets and companies change, so always do your own research. The content in this podcast is based on personal experience and is for educational purposes, not financial advice. See full disclaimer here.

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Transcript

Welcome to Roaming Returns, a podcast about generating a passive income through investing so that you don't have to wait till retirement to live your passions. More and more people on social are talking about yield max ETFs. We've been invested in these for a year now and want to share our experience.
Yes, these ETFs are sensational, but they can be quite risky if you get into the wrong ones or at the wrong price. Scope out the Tesla one and see what can happen. We've been around the block with high yield investments and know how you can reap the rewards while minimizing the risk.
Tune in to see what's possible with yield max ETFs and how you can turn them into a cash generating machine in your portfolio. People gather around. I have an important story to tell.
When I was your age, a loaf of bread cost a nickel. I hope that's not the story. No, that's not.
Okay. Remember last week we said we're going to discuss the yield maxes this week because yield maxes are, how do we phrase it? The shiznit. Oh my God, Tim.
Yeah. Just talk normal. The yield maxes, we've brought them up multiple times and we've kind of touched on them.
They're freaking gold. We touched on our strategy a couple of times, but it is, they're, what are they? Okay, let's start with them. What are they? They're basically a ETF created by a yield max that invests in one particular company.
For example, NVIDIA. NVDY. Okay.
NVDY. It's a yield maxes NVIDIA option ETF and basically what they hold are U.S. treasuries for like 90 to 95% of their holdings are U.S. treasuries. And then they do call options or puts on the underlying stock that they're invested in.
In this case it would be NVIDIA. So they have calls for NVIDIA and they have a few calls and a put, but basically how they make income is from these calls and puts. They take the premiums from the options.
If you're familiar with options trading, you actually, when you trade options, you get a premium and they take that premium, put it into the kitty and then they distribute the distributions based on that. The kitty. The kitty.
Are you sure it's actually 90%? Because over there that asset allocation says that it's 71% bonds. This here is a 6.3 is what they have in the NVIDIA options. And then, so this is 93.
Okay. So you're counting bonds and cash as safe. They are the same thing because these are treasury bonds and cash.
But I assume the cash is going to be for, oh, okay. So they're actually considering. They're considering one of these U.S. treasuries as a cash thing or whatever.
It's what it looks like. Okay. Anyway, what they do is they could, they trade options on the underlying stocks in the video.
Yieldmax is going to trade options on NVIDIA, the Coinbase, Yieldmax is going to trade options on Coinbase, et cetera. They're awesome. They're awesome.
So there's a way there. They're a good way to generate income. But there's a whole crap ton of these now.
There's a lot. Yeah. There's like so many.
That's why. And depending when you listen to this, like you'll want to go straight to Yieldmax's actual website. I'll put a link in the show notes and then you can click on that and they'll show you what their current earnings are and all the ones that are available.
Why I like them is because I don't like them as much as FEPI because FEPI actually holds the stocks that they're writing options on. But Yieldmax is a good way to generate income. And if you use, if you implement a reasonable strategy where you're not just putting like $100,000 into say the Tesla of Yieldmax like you see on Instagram or TikTok, YouTube, there's a lot of people that are putting a lot of money into these and they're the same.
Look how much money I'm gathering from them. So like what I did today is I actually went through all the Yieldmax's that we've held or are holding and I've broken it down into what we've made from it and like what price we bought at and what price it's currently at or what price we sold at. So you can see like the actual loss that we incurred.
But then with the dividends, so you can see like why the strategy I have is in place. Okay. And since we've been holding them for about a year, Tim's done a really good job with recognizing patterns and seeing which ones don't have the NAV decline as much and like normal buy-in prices based on their highs and lows throughout the year.
And the reason, okay, and I forgot to mention the reason, like I understand like you much would rather, you much rather would have Nvidia or Apple or Microsoft or Facebook or whatever, but like to actually make money off those, you have to sell the stock. So you have to buy Nvidia and then when it goes up, you have to sell it. So then you're actually not having the stock.
It's kind of, it's very hard. And selling is really hard because like you get emotional, you get greedy. It's very similar to like why we do dividends because we don't want to sell our shares.
We just want to collect money. So this is a way to collect income off of the stock that don't really pay shit for dividends. Facts.
Okay. We've had, we've held four Yieldmax for over a year now. We've held the Nvidia one, N-V-D-Y, the Amazon one, A-M-Z-Y, the Microsoft one, M-S-F-O, and the Coinbase one, C-O-N-Y.
Previously we've held, but we've sold the Tesla one, T-S-L-Y, the Apple one, A-P-L-Y, and the ExxonMobil one, X-O-M-O. We also have Y-Max and U-L-T-Y, but I've only had those for five months, so I can't really give you a year's worth of data. So we'll do those in a few months whenever we have a year's worth of data.
The ones that we sold, ExxonMobil, we bought that in September of 2023 for $20.34. And we collected dividends in October and November for 27 cents per share and 41 cents per share. So we sold our position in November at $17.77. So we lost, what is that, $17.18, $18.19, so almost like two and a half dollars per share. And the reason we did that, it was about a 10% loss if you include reinvesting the dividends or taking the dividends as cash, whichever method you use.
So that takes the dividends into court consideration? Yeah. So it was a 10% loss with dividends. The reason I got out of it is because these are not risk-free investments, so there is some inherent risk in them.
And the low yield didn't justify the risk of capital loss. So we got out as soon as I determined this, and we lost $95 total in that one. Tesla, we lost a shit ton of money on TSLY.
We bought this in August of 2023 for $14.22. We got dividends in September, October, November, December, and January, even with these dividends which were high at the time, and February and March, oh, we got, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. We collected dividends from September through March, 23 to 24. Yeah, I thought we held that one for a while.
We sold our position at $12.86 in April after they did a reverse stock split. And I did a reverse stock split in February, and I was like, okay, well maybe the reverse stock split will do some wonders for what's going on with this one. It didn't.
Yeah, I think they just kept managing it the same way, which is just absolute insanity. We were up prior to the stock split, but when they did the reverse stock split, we were down a lot. And because of the reverse stock split, we actually lost about 10% of our money in this one over about $1,300.
We put a pretty good amount into TSLY because I thought, it's Tesla. It should be all right. It should be amazing.
And it was good. And then once they did the reverse stock split in February, it just messed up the whole chi of this one because it was paying a pretty good dividend. It was $117, $115, $117, $121.
And then in February, the dividend went down, what is that, 30% or 40% after the stock split, reverse stock split. So we got out, lost about 10%. I still wouldn't invest in this one.
Actually, that's not a bad loss considering some of the people I've seen lose so much money in Tesla. But I don't think they had a strategy like us where we take the money out. I still wouldn't.
What I'm saying is I still wouldn't buy this one. No, definitely not. The person running this one, I'm under the belief that they have different people running different year maxes.
It's not like one person running them all because this one performed so shitty compared to other ones. Okay. The third one that we had was the Apple one, APLY.
We bought that in July of 2023 for $21.18, collected dividends from August through October. The dividends were not very much. It was 56, 23, and 48.
So we sold our position in October at 18.87. So we lost 6% in this one. But we did not, again, like see the ExxonMobil one, for the risk of this, the dividends were not enough to justify holding it. Although Apple, I do believe now at the current, what it's at now, I think is one that you might want to be interested in research and I think it's about time to maybe get back into that one.
But I probably won't. But other people might. The ones that we kept, the ones that we still have, the ones that we probably will have until they go to zero or whatever.
Or better ones come along. NVDY, the NVIDIA one, we bought that in August of 2023 for $22.03. So it was elevated. When these came out, they were $20 a piece.
Bought it for $22.03. We have collected $18.76 in dividends from September through the present. So we've almost collected enough in dividends to actually pay for the stock. Currently the price of this one is $22.97. This was as of 9-26.
So it's $22.97. Our initial, we collected back our initial investment of $2,000 in NVIDIA in February and we've just been holding and reinvesting from that point on. And we currently hold- Because it's all free money, right? It's all house money? So we currently hold about $1,200, $1,200-ish around there in NVIDIA yield max. And so that's damn near 60% gain on top of.
We'll get in our initial investment back. So that's pretty good. I like it.
I really like this one. I think it's really well ran. And when I get to the best performing ones, I actually broke down the best performing ones of 2024 and the ones to maybe not look at for 2024, but look at for 2025.
The ones that are doing like crap this year. We'll go through that list here in a few minutes, but NVIDIA is a really, really, really good one. The second one that we have that we've kept is the Amazon one, AMZY.
We bought that in September of 23 for $21.45. We haven't collected as much dividends as we have in the NVIDIA one, but this one is impeccably ran actually. We've collected $8.43 in dividends from October to the present. The current price of Amazon, the AMZY is $19.78. So it's been hanging around.
It's the initial price of $20. We're still in the process of getting back our initial investment of a thousand in this one. We hold 1,357.
So we've gained 36% in a year. So this one's actually doing exactly what if you look, if you go on the Yieldmax website, it'll tell you what the yields are. And this one is consistently been between like 35 and 40%.
So it's actually spot on, 36% gain in a year. The third one that we've kept is the Microsoft one, MSFO. We bought that in September of 2023 for $20.69. We've collected a 6.67 in dividends from this from October last year to the present.
It's currently trading at 2020. And so again, we're still in the process of getting back our initial thousand dollar investment. We hold 1,302 in this.
So again, 30% gain in a year-ish, almost a year, because like once we get our next dividend, it'll be a year, but pretty good. And then the fourth one that we still hold is the Coinbase One, Cony, C-O-N-Y. We bought that 9-23, September of 2023 for $15.43. We've collected $20.57 in dividends.
So this one's actually a really good pair. On the current price, it's 13.10. We actually got our initial investment of $1,000 back in December of last year. But I did actually just dump another $1,000 into it in August since the price of Coinbase, which is kind of corresponding with the price of crypto, was down so far.
So we still need... So we had it paid back, and then we decided to get back in it again because the valuation was just so juicy. Yeah, so like we currently hold $1,400 in Coinbase. If you take out the $1,000, we were up $400.
So I could actually get the $1,000 back at any point. I just want to get some more shares in there too, actually, because this one consistently is paying like $1, $10, $20, $30 per share. So probably once I get up to $2,000, which will probably be before the end of the year, I'll take that second $1,000 out and have another $1,000 in there.
But the next two that we actually... These are the ones I said I'll go into more depth in once we have them for a year. But the YMAX one we bought in April of this year for $1,943. It's currently at $1,764.
We've actually collected $293 in dividends. So the dividends have actually helped keep this one around like a 2% to 3% gain. We currently hold $3,177, and we put our initial investment was $3,000.
So we're actually up $177 in this one. But this one I'm using specifically for a paycheck generator, so this one we probably should have for a while. What the YMAX one is, if you haven't heard before, every time Yieldmax comes out with a new ETF, YMAX automatically rebalances its portfolio to include everything they offer plus the new thing, so that everything's equal weight.
So it has everything they hold. So it's like the index fund of Yieldmax, which is really awesome. So I like this one a lot, and it did just go from a monthly pair to a week-to-week pair, and we've only collected two weeks of the weekly dividends, but they seem to be actually better than the monthly so far.
So this is one that I will probably revisit at the end of the year. December we'll revisit it and say is it still a yay or nay, but as of right now, this one is a yay. And if it keeps going, I think this is one that should be part of everybody's portfolio for the cash cow factor.
These are amazing for cash generation. And the last one that we still hold is ULTY. This one's super risky.
So if you're a retiree, probably want to steer clear of this one, but if you're a person that's in their 30s, 40s, or 50s trying to generate income so they can retire early, this one may be an option. What this one does is they sell options, but not on Yieldmax stuff. Generally, it's small cap options.
They have like really like 10 that they alternate. They'll have 10 and okay, let me how to paraphrase this. They started the month of September with 10.
In October, if there's better buying potential, they'll get rid of the ones that aren't as good and they'll invest in those other options in October. So they're always, there's that portfolio turnover in this one for better options. I'm assuming they're doing that because them isolating themselves to a single stock in the other Yieldmax ETFs may be hindering them because you typically for options trading make the most money when things are very volatile.
So volatility is good and then if they actually have the ability to choose which stocks they think are going to be volatile based on news or whatever reason, that's what this Yieldmax is essentially for. We've collected 388 in dividends from this one. We got this in June or actually May, so we got our first dividend in June.
Current price is 1044, so it's down what, $4.10. So we're actually down almost 2% in this one, but the share price has fallen 28%. So again, this one's literally just a paycheck cash cow. I do sometimes reinvest, like when it's at 1040, $11, I'll reinvest the dividend.
Pardon me, but if it's up at like 12 or 13, I'll turn the dividend to cash. I was now complete sidebar. In Schwab, it is so easy to actually do your reinvestments.
You literally just click on your positions and it'll pull up all your positions and it'll say, dividend reinvest, yes, and if you click on that, you can change from yes to no. I was in Vanguard, holy Christ. There's none of those tabs.
I literally had to go to the search bar and say how do I do the turn the drip on or off and then it took you to like, you have to go to your profile information page and then you have to scroll down like two thirds of the page down on your profile page to come to dividend reinvestment. You need to click on that and then it's not even self-explanatory from there. You have to pick which one, like you can just say, do you want it to go into your settlement fund or do you want the dividends reinvested and then they have a thing where normally whenever you pull up a list and you say, okay, I want to put this into dividend reinvestment, you just click on what you want.
So it's not intuitive at all. Vanguard's opposite. You have to click off what you don't want.
So it took me like five minutes. It's like, why the fuck does it keep doing this? What the hell is going on? I was like, oh my God, I need to learn to read. Well, and then again, like we're a huge proponent of Schwab and Tim also had a brokerage set up with Wells Fargo just for like simplicity factor because he had a checking account with them and I think the drip for a lot of those was like you had to call them to turn it on and off.
Yeah, for Wells Fargo, you literally had to call them to actually get their okay for you to actually be able to turn the drip on in your account. Complete asinine. So that's ludicrous.
Wells Fargo's trash. Robinhood's pretty good for dividend reinvestment. A good brokerage account will make or break like frustration.
And so far I have SoFi now. SoFi is actually, I have a SoFi brokerage and they're actually pretty good. You just like it's intuitive, but intuitive.
Vanguard's not and Wells Fargo's just trash. Okay, sidebar over. So those are the six that we're currently holding.
NVIDIA, Amazon, Microsoft, Coinbase, YMAX and Utility, ULTY. I don't know why they named it that. That's so stupid for what they're doing with it.
So now we're going to go through some of that better ones that they, I'm going to go through six that I think are the better ones. The best of the rest is what I call them. Some of them I may get into at some point.
I was going to say, so we're planning, because these have been performing so well for us, when we go to sell the condo, we're going to have about $100,000 in sweat equity and we're going to take, I think, 30% of that money that we agreed on. 33%. 33% of that money and we're actually going to dump it into Yieldmax to generate an actual monthly payment to live off of so that we can allow our good investments to continue to compound so we don't actually have to touch them.
So if you see the math behind that is if we do one third into risky, quote, you see my air quotes, risky, and then we take two thirds and put it into the stuff that's actually going to grow and be good and everything like that. So we're actually going to be able to live off of 33% and then we're actually going to be able to have two thirds of it actually compound for future, in case these don't last. There's no guarantee they will, but there's no guarantee they won't.
So to me, these are just smoke them if you got them, right? Smoke them if you got them. Smoke them like a true knit fitter. So best of the rest.
JP Morgan. JPMO. It's currently $1805.
It's down 10% year to date. The average dividend year to date is $0.39 per month and the average year to date yield for this one's 26%. So this one's pretty conservative when it comes to the average yield.
If you go on the YMAX page, you'll actually see that 26 is like on the low, low, low end of what they're offering. They have upwards like 100, 110%. So this is a low one.
It's currently trading within 5% of its 52 week low. So if you think the banking sector is going to pop off with the interest rate cuts and whatever else is going on, you may want to consider this one. I wouldn't buy this above 1875.
So take that for what it's worth. Maybe you know better than me, but JP Morgan is actually pretty decent. The second best of the rest is the PayPal one.
PYPY. It's currently at $1845. It's only down $7.2 year to date.
If you reinvest the dividends, you're actually going to be up in all these because 10% obviously if you do 26% and it's two thirds of the year, that's going to be what? Yeah, you have to keep in mind that these are not like regular stocks. So we'll discuss our strategy as soon as we're done with the list here, what I do, what other people do, and you can choose which one you think is the best or better, or maybe you have your own options or ideas or whatever. These are literally just, if you have an idea, try it.
If it works, awesome. If it doesn't try another idea the next month, you know, like these are like, these aren't like what I'm saying. It's not like this is what you should do, but like if you may be able to tweak what I came up with and come up with a better idea, I don't know anyway, PayPal that's down 7.2 year to date.
It's average dividend a year to date is 71 cents per month. It's average yield so far for 2024 is 46% and it's currently trading within 14.6 of its 52 week high. So this one, not really contrarian investment here, but if you think the digital payment sector or the China, is PayPal China? No, it's Alibaba.
I don't know. Or if you think. PayPal's an Elon Musk thing.
If you think the digital payment sector is going to stay strong, you may want to consider this income. This one for income. I wouldn't buy this one for like more than 1950, obviously $20 would be the absolute highest I would go for any of these.
Yeah. Cause that's their intro par value basically. So I think PayPal is going to be strong.
This is what I'm looking at. But because I have Ymax, I actually am invested in this. I don't have to really think about it too hard.
The third one is Square, you know, Square, that little thing they attached to the phone. Very similar to PayPal. Yeah.
The SQY, it's currently at 1808. This one's down 30% year to date, whereas PayPal was only down like 7%. The average dividend year to date for Square is 89 cents per share, whereas the average year to date yield in 2024 is 59%.
It's currently trading within 11.7% of its 52 week low. So here's where you have like that whole thing where just, do you go into PayPal, which is high, or do you go into Square, which is on the lower end of like, so you have to determine which one you like better. For me, I would probably take the PayPal one, even though you're taking a 13% less yield because it seems to be performing better.
I actually think the, the, the yield for the PayPal one is similar to the Ymax. I would actually just go with the Ymax in my opinion. Nah.
I would, I wouldn't buy Square for more than 19, but like maybe 18, 25, like I would watch this one and see if it keeps going down. If it goes down, then obviously you have to adjust your buy up to price based on charts and science and gut, gut feeling and all that other crap. The fourth one is the Netflix one and N-F-L-Y, N-F-L-Y.
It's currently 1697. It's only down 6.7 year to date. It's average dividend so far in 2024 is 74 cents per share per month.
It's a average yield for 2024 so far is 52% and it's trading within 13.3% of its 52 week low. So depending on how you feel about Netflix, like you, so like for all of these, you have to have an understanding of the underlying options that they're trading. So you like, you can't just say, Hmm, I think I'll go in that one.
You actually like, you have to know what's going on with Netflix. Netflix is having a pretty fucking volatile year because like they're like, Ooh, they're making a lot of money. Oh, they're losing subscribers because they're cracking down the passwords, all this.
So like this is a volatile one. Volatility is actually good for these. So this is a one that you may want to actually consider because volatility at 52% would be nice.
But at the same time, what's the correlation between a stock price and the actual yield max? Say Netflix goes up, does N-F-L-Y go up? It'll go up, but not like if Netflix goes up, say 20% from now through the end of the year, N-F-L-Y will go up probably two to three. Okay. But it moves in the direction.
There is a cap because of the options trading and the puts and calls and everything. There always is going to be a cap, but like these aren't real, realistically these, you're not in these for price appreciation. You get price appreciation.
Awesome. No, but you can at least kind of estimate where your buy-in point is based on what you think the actual underlying stock's going to do. So ideally for these, you kind of want to shoot for a sideways.
That would be ideal. Absolutely. Even though that doesn't really work for the volatility component.
That does, because if Netflix goes up to 5%, this will go up 1%, and if Netflix goes down 5%, it'll go down 1% or 2%, so you kind of want it to, do you want the underlying options to be volatile? Oh, so you're saying you want the volatility, but you want it to be basically overall straight across? Mm-hmm. What I found, anyways, in our years worth of holdings is that you want volatility because you get paid more, and then you have the potential for like appreciation like in the NVIDIA one, you had like some price appreciation. Yeah, but you got a lot more on CONY.
With Coinbase, yeah, the Coinbase one, we were getting a lot more in monthly dividends, but we weren't, the price appreciation was kind of piss poor, like went down a lot. So there's a trade-off. The NFLY one, I wouldn't go above $17.75 currently.
Again, that could change based on factors that I don't have. The fifth one is the Facebook one, FBY. It's currently at $19.47. It's down 10% year-to-date.
It's averaging $0.90 per share per month in 2024 thus far. It's current average yield for 2024 is 56%. This one's within 18%-ish of its 52-week low.
So if you like Facebook, some people do. I wouldn't buy this for more than 2020. It's going to obviously be my cutoff for these because that's basically their beginning NAV price.
I don't like this one, but this one's actually kind of conservative. 56% yield? Kind of conservative? Mm-hmm. All right.
And the last one, the last of my best of the rest list is the AMDY. It's basically AMD, which is the microchip processor one. This one's had a horrible 2024.
So this one might actually be a one to consider because it's had such a horrible 2024. It's down 40% for the year. It's currently at $14.30. Its average dividends per month are $1.01 per share.
So that's nice. We like to see that over a dollar. Its year-to-date average yield so far in 2024 is 85%.
So this is a more aggressive one. I wouldn't buy it for anything above $15 currently. That could change, but as of this week, it would be $15.
Those are some of the ones that I don't ever really mention, so I figured I should mention some of the better ones. Okay. So.
And that was a computer chip one. So if you think those are going to go off, my question would be, what happened to AMD this year that kept it suppressed? Because we both do believe in the AI and the chip thing happening. And then don't they have another AI stock at EXAI No.
They have AYYY or something. AYYY and it had a horrible year. We'll get to that in a second.
Okay. Chips, the chips, because we had what they considered an AI bubble up through like. They think it was a bubble pop.
Like July. July, maybe the beginning of August, like all pretty much you couldn't go wrong with an AI stock. And since it topped out, it's just been straight downhill.
So the fact that NVIDIA is doing as well as it is is shocking, but like the NVIDIA stock is not doing that well. So all the AI stocks pretty much got just shit on after like. I think that's just like a pullback before.
The experts proclaimed that we were at the top of a bubble. It can't be the bubble end for the AI. There's no way.
I think they've only scratched the surface. So I went through. So I did a lot of research for this.
So thumbs up if you wish, whatever. Pat me on the back. I went through all of them and I came out with the best performing ones in 2024 thus far with dividends reinvested.
Number one is NVIDIA. It's returned 86% so far in 2024. Like I said, this one's just been rocking.
Number two is the Netflix one at 35% year to date. With dividends reinvested. So if you go back here and you look, it's down 6.7 just on its share price for the year.
So that means with its dividends, it's actually up 41% if you reinvest the dividends or you take the cash and you actually like there's a school of thought that you don't include dividends whenever you're calculating your cost basis and your total returns. Those people are idiots. You always use your dividends in calculating your returns.
So with the dividends reinvested, Netflix is actually up almost 36% for 2024. Did you say Netflix? Yeah, Nfly. Oh, okay.
I thought we were looking at the other one. Number three on this list is the Facebook one. FBY is up about 32%.
Again, if you go up here to what we were just discussing, it says it's based on its share price. It's down 10%. So if you reinvest the dividends, you're up 41%, 42%.
So this is just showing you like the power of the dividends in the yield maxes is unheard of. Well, is that with reinvesting? No. You said that wasn't necessarily with reinvesting, but that's with incorporating the- You include your dividends.
Yeah. But how I do it is like, say I'm in a stock, we'll say stock X, stock X gives me a dividend for 50 cents. I will take 50 cents off of my cost basis because I got paid on it so my cost basis went down.
Whether I reinvest that or take it in cash, it's irrelevant. It's 50 cents off of my cost basis. It's money back in your pocket.
And I do that with these. I know we'll just discuss what we do, strategery-wise, here in a hot minute, but- I love the word strategy. Number four, the best performing yield max in 2024 is the PayPal one.
It's at 31.2% return so far this year. Number five is the Amazon one, AMZY, it's up 23.06, so 23.1 around there, which is pretty good if you remember that it doesn't really pay out that much. Number six is the Microsoft one, which is up about 14%, again, which is really good because Microsoft, again, doesn't pay out a lot per month, so this is almost all like appreciation, share appreciation, because you're not getting crap for dividends, we'll be getting Microsoft. We've only got 667, so we're only getting like, what is that? That's like maybe 30%, certainly getting maybe 30% on the Microsoft one to be up 13.7, 13.8, it's pretty good.
Number seven is the ExxonMobil one, which I'm pissed about because I got out of it, but it's up 12% year-to-date. Number eight, again, I'm pissed because I got out of it, is the Apple one, APLY is up about 11% year-to-date. Number nine is JP Morgan, JPMO, which is up about 8% year-to-date.
I don't know that it's you got out of it, it's that you got out of it with a loss, right? And number 10 is GUI, which is Google, G-O-O-Y, it's up about 5%. Now the ones that haven't done that well this year, the ones that, there's a Moderna yield max and it's down 42% year-to-date, so that one, the contrarian to me is like, I might want to look at this one. And that's with the dividend reinvestment.
Oh my God. I can't even. It's down your 70% for year-to-date.
That's crazy, crazy, crazy. The second worst performing one is the AI one that Carmela mentioned a minute ago, AIYY, it's down about 30% year-to-date. Now this one was actually up through May and then since May to the present, it's just basically just shot straight the F down.
And the third worst performing one in 2024 so far is the Tesla one, TSLY, and I can't say I'm surprised. Whoever runs that's an idiot. We have said that multiple times.
So now how do we trade these? Because there are multiple people that, multiple influencers that talk about these. They get in them, they lose. So how do we trade them? That's all I can say.
Well, I keep track of my initial investments. So for example, I bought $1,000 worth of Coinbase recently on 9-7. You mean Coney? Yeah, Coney, C-O-N-Y.
When I get a dividend, I take it in cash generally. There's some that I don't like, the Amazon one and the Microsoft one, I'm still taking those in additional shares so that when we're on the road, I can turn the drip off and collect them in cash. I'm actually just increasing my share count and the ones that I find to be more conservative with better overall returns and then I will turn those off at some point.
So with the Coinbase example, on 9-9, I received $102.59 in cash. So I subtract the dividend from the initial investment in this case. So I have $1,000 I initially invested and I subtract the $102.59, which leaves me with $897.41 left to collect.
That should take me six months-ish around there and then I keep doing that until I actually have no money left to actually invest in it, but then I turn the drip on, not permanently but semi-permanently. With this strategy, I get back my initial investment plus I get to keep the 64 shares that I bought on 9-7. That make sense? Mm-hmm.
Because I'm not actually selling, I'm not selling the $1,500 I have in Coinbase to get my $1,000 out and then buying or selling $1,000 worth. I'm keeping my 64 shares and I've collected $1,000 back already. So it's kind of like how I mitigate the risk in these is by you want to get your initial investment back as soon as possible because then it's, I don't want to say house money, but it's far less.
You're taking all your risk off the table. Far less stressful. Yes.
Let me put it that way. You're taking all your risk off the table and it's actually making investing fun and it's turning it more into like a gamification aspect, which people tend to make better decisions when they don't, they're not playing with their own money. How that differs from other people.
Other people actually, I don't see them taking the cash. I see them, I made $10,000 in Tesla and they reinvest the full 10,000 to get more shares to in theory make more money the following month. But for me, like as someone that wants to live off this and not really touch my portfolio, I want to have like a no touch portfolio to live off of.
I want to get my initial investment back so that then I can just leave it for as long as these roll. Again, smoke them if you got them. It's like, we don't know how long these will be around.
It could be 10 years. It could be 10 months. It could be 10 weeks.
We don't know. Just because we don't know because there's that variable of uncertainty, I want to make sure I get my money back so that it's not hurting my chances like three years down the road because I lost $5,000 in Coinbase. And the reason this is so important, if you have ever been in crypto and you've done the staking or you've done the yield farming stuff, what happens specifically with the staking thing is they do share dilution.
And as the shares dilute because they're paying you back with more shares of the stuff, the price of the actual coin is going down and down and down and down and down. So you need those more shares to even break even. But the more people that pile in, the faster the price goes down.
So recouping that cost, like even though the yields are insane on some of those, like you end up losing in the long run. We want to avoid that situation as much as possible. And then again, if they keep producing cash, but these are based on something different than the crypto strategies are, where they just do, I'm not even sure what they do to yield out, but these are doing the option.
So this actually has a much more secure structure, in my opinion, and it should be able to continue longevity wise, but on the off chance that it doesn't or ends up in the ballpark of like the TSLY one, we got our butts covered. And that's all that's important. So now how I like, I'm going to actually apply this to the real world now.
Okay. I had to look this up this morning. On average, Americans spend about $21.50 per year on gas, which is about $179 per month.
I'm just going to do like an example of your work expenses. Okay. We're going to do your work expenses so you can see how you can pay for your work expenses with Yieldmax.
Okay. On average, $180 a month in gas. On average, it's about $2,400 for complete coverage on a vehicle or a minimum coverage is $640.
Car insurance. Car insurance. So full coverage is about $200 a month for your car insurance, driving back and forth to work, or if you do minimum coverage like we do, it's about $50 a month.
According to the Resume Building Survey, where they actually ask full-time employees what they spend for work, many full-time employees spend at least $15 when they buy breakfast, with 60% buying breakfast at least three times per week and 10% do it every day. So that's a minimum of $2,340 per year on breakfast. So that's about $195 to $200 a minimum on breakfast.
I'm seeing a pattern here. Almost every one of these expenses is about $200 a month. Boom, boom, boom.
The same survey found that 71% of employees purchase lunch at least three times per week with 10% again buying lunch every day and 24% buy it four days a week. The average was $20 per lunch, so you're spending between $31,000, $20,000, and $5,200 on lunch every year. That's insane.
Well, that's why that's those hidden costs of working that people don't realize. You need to subtract things you wouldn't normally be doing away from that actual hourly rate. $260 per month on the low end.
So just leave it $260. I can't. I'm sorry.
I have to see it. And it's $433 per month on the high end. That's just on lunch.
On lunch. I wonder why people think they have to make so much money to live. So then there was another survey completed by Flava.
I guess it's a beverage thing. Flavia. The average American spends about $16 per visit when buying coffee, which is the average of 2.5 coffees, iced coffees, tea, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Coffee's like my biggest pet peeve when it comes to work expenditures. Biggest pet peeve. If you make three visits a week, which is, I think most people make more than three, but if you make three a week, it's $2,500 per year.
The next one is crazy. I can't even fathom this, but the most recent survey from Motley Fool shows that Americans spend on average about $1,500 or $125 a month on apparel. Clothes for work.
But that's not as bad as the $200-something a month on coffee. That's crazy. I mean, it's still bad.
I can't even imagine continuing to keep buying work clothes. So, if we were to cut out one breakfast a week, one lunch a week, one coffee a week, and one month of clothes shopping, ideally we would brown bag breakfast and lunch, brew coffee, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you didn't eat out and you brought your coffee and your food to work, you'd save about $8,000 for the year, but in this example, we're just going to do one breakfast, one lunch, one coffee.
We would save about $3.29 a month if you just did one week, or cutting one breakfast, one lunch, one coffee, and one month of clothes shopping. So $3.29 for a month. If you invest that in Yieldmax at one of the conservative ones, like the Nfly or the FBY one, you could be making $15.35 a month on that $3.29. Potentially, inevitably.
Or $184.29 for the year. So, if you just cut out one breakfast a week and one month of clothes shopping, you could almost do ... What is that? One that's like ... Replace one of your coffee expenses. 60% of your total expenditures that you're saving.
Yeah, and the amazing part of this is it's not an indefinite thing that you have to do, but if you do it to actually put it into a cash generating machine that then replaces that, you can go back to spending the way you were spending before. So now, to me, the primary objective of these is to replace your paycheck, and we'll get to theirs. But to do that, you're actually going to need seed money.
So you have to do that. You have to save, or you have to cut expenditures, however you do it. Credit card points.
To replace all the expenditures on the list, you would need $12,247, which is on the low end, taking the lowest total possible of all the things I just mentioned. The high end is about $16,000. You would need about $25,000 invested in FBY, NFLY, or PYPY, the conservative YMAXs.
You could bring it down more by investing in CONY, Coinbase, NVIDIA, or AMDY, then you're only talking about $15,000 to $16,000 to start with, where you could basically replace all of your expenditures for work with your dividends, cash you're generating. So then you could pocket more of your actual paycheck. But I think it's very achievable to actually replace your whole paycheck with YieldMax.
The average salary in the U.S. after taxes is $58,390. So if you had $100,000, you could actually put it into conservative YieldMaxs, and that would actually cover your salary for the year. So if you just saved $100,000, I know that's just saved, but if you have $100,000, you could literally just put it into YieldMax, pay for your paycheck, you wouldn't have to work anymore.
But if you look at that in the context of needing to save $1 million to retire, period, that's only a tenth of that value. And if you did the more aggressive ones, like the Coinbase or the NVIDIA or the AMDY one, you literally could just save your paychecks for one year, $58,000, and you'd be able to replace your $58,000 salary just using YieldMaxs. So it's very possible to literally not have to worry about working ever again.
Or you could keep working if you wanted to, put more money into other stuff, that's up to you. But I don't want to say... But it might give you the freedom to go into hobbies. Put all of your money into YieldMaxs because that seems crazy.
Yeah, definitely. We definitely don't recommend putting all your money in YieldMaxs. But I'm just saying you literally could, if you saved up for let's say three or four years, you literally could replace your salary with YieldMax, and then you wouldn't have to work.
Instead of hustling, side gigs, starting a business, all that maintenance and extra stuff that people don't necessarily want to do, because I totally get it. So my problem with these is people are irresponsible, the influencers are irresponsible out there with how they discuss their strategy, but at the same time, I'm flabbergasted that more people don't know about them. It's going to happen.
We're going to be pimping this. So these are, like I said, we're probably going to have, by the end of everything, we'll probably have about 10% of all of our portfolio in YieldMaxs, one way or another, whether it's YMAX, utility, or if I keep it NVIDIA or Coinbase, whatever, it's going to be about 10%, maybe 8%, I don't know yet, because we do have a couple other ones that we use for cash cows, so I don't know. But I wouldn't put more than 10% of your portfolio into YieldMax.
You can be more aggressive in the beginning if you're willing to lose. Unless you're like in your 30s, because you can make that up. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
You can make that up. You can make that up. Depends how quick you want to do it.
But if you get aggressive and you stay smart, you can really make a huge difference in your life financially. The only way I would actually put more than 10% is if you actually devised a strategy where you're covering your ass, so you're not losing your initial investment, which is what we have explained, where you take out your initial investment as soon as you possibly can, and then let it compound, or you can, I guess, put it into other stuff. I do it in her father's account.
I have him in YieldMaxs, and I take it and I put, it's not a lot, he only has 3,000 on there, so he's only generating about $50 a month, but I take the $50 and I put it into other stocks that are dividend payers that are better. So within probably 10 to 12 years, he's going to have more in other stocks than he has invested in the YieldMax. YieldMax.
And in the YieldMax, if they're still there, awesome. If not, then he actually has a $3,000 or $4,000 portfolio that he wouldn't have otherwise. So I'm just saying they're an option that everyone should consider.
If you have any questions, for sure, for sure, email us. I can do my best to answer them as best as I can, but it's just an option that I think you should seriously think about, research, and include in your income each month. Definitely.
Especially if you're trying to supercharge, retire early, fire the whole shebang, this is way, way, way better and way easier than side hustling, and it definitely takes away that brutality fatigue that a lot of people complain about because you don't have to worry about saving for 30 years and missing life. You can live it while you're saving. It's fantastic.
I didn't do the math on that, but if you cut out all those stupid, ridiculous expenditures and you save $8,000, you could put that in YieldMax and make like $4,000. Well, if you go back to the other episodes that we talked about ways to save, like the tax return, we were talking about the credit card points. You take a whole month of credit card points, put it in this.
You can do all sorts of different things. Renting versus zoning. Taking the difference.
I mean, even if it's just a couple months, the possibilities are endless. Or you could go side hustle and just do it for a month and then just throw it all into an account. But if you are like us and you're trying to live on the road, these obviously have to be a chunk of your expenditures for the road.
Yeah. If you're trying to retire early and you literally need that passive income, this is an essential strategy to implement. So hopefully that helps you guys understand these things a little bit more compared to all the hype and BS that's happening in the social realms where people are like, what the hell do they call it? Sensationalism crap.
High reward does not always mean high risk. And so next week I'm thinking about doing a growth stock podcast. You know, like the dirty word we never bring up around here because I just composed an email about it.
So I might actually make it into a podcast so we can discuss what we have in our IRAs and our portfolios, what we have in growth stocks, because there are some bangers. So I may do that. If I don't do that, then I'll probably do something along the lines of, I was reading recently about how lower interest rates don't necessarily mean lower housing expenses.
And that might be an interesting podcast. I haven't decided yet. Ooh, I actually think that one would be good.
What we're doing next week. Depends what I get done this week. All right, guys.
Hopefully that helped you. And let us know if you have any questions or whatever. Reach out to us.
We have like a whole bunch of contact methods. And we'll see you. Have a good week.
See you next week. Stay dry.