The next morning I published Meta Platforms: The King of AI Monetization and argued the sell-off was driven by one-time charges while the AI inside Meta’s ad machine was already paying off, and that the market was pricing Meta like Zuckerberg didn’t have a plan. Paid subscribers also saw that Meta was one of my largest positions. Meta closed at $556.71 that day. On September 24 it closed at $777.59, which puts the stock up 39.7% in under two months by my math.

The plan I said the market was missing now has a name, and it's called Muse. Since it launched on September 8, Meta has gained 26.7% (my math), with a single 11.43% day on September 21 that added close to $190 billion in market value. I still own my shares, and I think the part of this story that matters most for the business hasn't shown up in the financials yet.

Key takeaways

• Meta is up 39.7% from my July 31 call and 26.7% since Muse launched on September 8 (both my math on closing prices).

• Muse logged 1.8 million iOS downloads in the U.S. and Canada in its first 12 days, ahead of ChatGPT’s 1.3 million over the same stretch.

• Muse can earn money three ways: paid subscriptions at $20 and $100 a month, checkout on partner stores, and deeper engagement inside apps Meta already owns.

• The agent gives Meta’s $130 billion to $145 billion capex budget something investors have been demanding since July: a consumer product people will pay for.

• At $777.59, Meta trades at 22.3 times 2027 earnings, right on its five-year average, and $1,000 a share needs as little as 24.8 times if Muse lifts EPS toward the high-end estimate (my math).

What Is Meta Muse?

Picture telling your phone to find a dinner reservation for four on Friday, email the group the details, and put it on everyone’s calendar, then going back to whatever you were doing while it handles the whole thing. That’s the pitch for Muse, a personal AI agent that opens a browser, fills out forms, sends emails, books travel and pays for things through Stripe’s Link checkout, with you approving each purchase. TechCrunch reports it runs on Muse Spark, the model family Meta built specifically for this kind of multi-step work.

Most AI apps you’ve used still stop at the advice stage, where the chatbot drafts an email and you’re the one who hits send. Muse does the sending, and Meta made it available everywhere its users already spend time: a standalone app, the web, WhatsApp, and a Mac app that launched on September 17 and lets the agent work directly on your computer.

Then came Connect on September 23, where Zuckerberg called Muse the centerpiece of everything Meta is building. The company’s own Connect recap lists a wave of new shopping partners, including Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora, Ulta and Wayfair, plus Shop Pay and PayPal for payments, with Expedia and Instacart on the way and work tools like Notion, GitHub and Box already connected. Meta also showed off Muse Charm, a keychain-sized gadget for talking to your agent without pulling out your phone.

Every one of those partners is a place Muse can complete a purchase, and every surface Meta adds is another way to keep people inside its ecosystem for longer, which is where the revenue case for Muse starts.

How Fast Is Muse Growing?

ChatGPT is the benchmark every AI launch gets measured against, since it became the fastest-adopted consumer app in history back in 2023, and Muse beat its opening pace. Yahoo Finance reported that Muse picked up 1.8 million iOS downloads in the U.S. and Canada during its first 12 days, compared with 1.3 million for ChatGPT over the same window, and reached about 2.8 million installs across every platform.

Muse also climbed to the number one spot on Apple’s U.S. App Store, and that’s what set off the September 21 rally. TipRanks reported that Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski raised his price target from $640 to $796 that morning, arguing that Meta’s AI launches are finally giving it a real story to tell after a year of delayed models and spending questions.

JPMorgan’s Doug Anmuth went further, writing that Muse has the potential to become “the most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT,” according to The Motley Fool. After Connect, Jefferies lifted its target from $710 to $875 and Tigress Financial went from $945 to $995, per the news feeds on StockAnalysis and CNN Markets.

Downloads and price targets tell you people are excited, and that’s worth something, but I own Meta for the cash flow it can produce five years from now, so what matters is whether Muse moves the revenue and margin numbers that drive it.

How Does Muse Make Meta Money?

In July I split AI into three layers, the apps that distribute it, the models, and the infrastructure underneath, and said Meta was the rare company with a real stake in all three. Muse is the first product where all three show up at once: Muse Spark is the model, Meta’s own data centers run it, and Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp hand it to billions of people.

The bear case back then came down to one complaint: Meta doesn’t rent out cloud computing the way Microsoft and Amazon do, so there’s no clean line on the income statement that shows AI paying for itself. Muse gives Meta three new ways to fill in that line.

Subscriptions come first.

Muse is free up to a weekly usage cap, then moves to paid plans of $20 or $100 a month depending on how hard you work the agent, according to TradingKey. That’s a consumer revenue stream Meta has never really had, and the business line it lands in is already growing fast: Family of Apps “other revenue” hit $1 billion for the first time in Q2, up 73% year over year, driven mostly by WhatsApp paid messaging and subscriptions, per Meta’s Q2 earnings call.

Meta hasn’t said how many Muse users pay, so the chart below is my own illustration rather than a forecast. Every million people on the $20 Power plan works out to $240 million a year, and ten million would add $2.4 billion, which is more than half of what that entire “other revenue” line produces today on an annualized basis.

Commerce is the second lane.

Every partner Meta signed at Connect is a store where Muse can finish a checkout, and an agent that buys things for you sits right where advertisers want to be, at the exact moment someone is ready to spend. Meta’s ad business already runs on predicting what you’ll buy next, and Muse closes the loop by completing the purchase inside Meta’s own product.

Engagement is the third, and the biggest over time.

TECHi, citing Apptopia, estimates that more than 95% of Muse users also use Facebook and 63% use Instagram, which means Meta can put Muse in front of the record 3.6 billion people who use its apps every day, per 24/7 Wall St., without paying to acquire them, the same way it scaled Threads. More time spent in Meta’s apps means more ad impressions, and in Q2 ad impressions were already up 14% with the average price per ad up 12%, according to Investing.com’s breakdown of the Q2 slides.

Meta signing with AWS is part of why I'm putting every covered call premium into Amazon each week. Here's that full breakdown: Buy Alert: I'm Adding Another $15,000 To Amazon.

Owning the shares is only half of how I'm playing this. Meta pays me a tiny dividend, so this week I'm putting another $2,500 into an income position that pays me every single week, and at its recent payouts that's hundreds of dollars a year of new income landing in my account without selling a share of anything. The ticker, the math on what it pays, and why I picked it over buying more stock are below.

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I’m going to leave that fight to the politicians, because the word “dividend” in that headline hit a nerve for me in a different way. I’ve been building dividend income since 2018 for one reason, which is that I hated working and wanted a paycheck that didn’t need me to show up. In August alone my portfolio paid me $4,918, which is almost the entire Trump check in a single month, and it’ll pay me again in September, October and every month after that without anybody needing to win an election.

So let's answer the question nobody covering this story is asking: how much money do YOU need invested to collect $5,000 a year in dividends on your own, and how long does it take to get there starting from zero?

Key takeaways

• The proposed Trump dividend is $5,000 per adult citizen, tied to Republicans winning the midterms, and would need Congress to approve it.

• To earn $5,000 a year on your own you need about $142,900 at a 3.5% yield, $71,400 at 7%, or $50,000 at 10%.

• $5,000 a year works out to about $417 a month, or roughly $96 a week from weekly payers.

• Investing $500 a month into a 7% payer gets you to the $5,000 mark in under nine years, and $1,000 a month gets you there in about five.

👉 By the end of this you'll know your exact number, which kinds of funds shorten the timeline, and the first move to make this week.

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What is the $5,000 Trump dividend check?

It’s a proposed one-time payment of $5,000 to every adult U.S. citizen, promised on the condition that Republicans keep the House and Senate in November. Trump’s own words at the convention were that he would “issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” and he added that the money “must be spent in the United States of America,” although nobody has explained how that part would be enforced. Senator Bernie Moreno has said he’ll introduce legislation to pass it right after the election.

With roughly 245 million adult citizens eligible, PBS puts the cost at about $1.2 trillion, and Vice President JD Vance has said some of it would come from tariff revenue. PBS also reports that any payment like this needs Congress to approve it, and that the $2,000 tariff dividend Trump floated in November 2025 never went out.

None of the reporting so far says whether this would be a single check or something that repeats, so the safest way to read it today is as a one-time payment. That's where the money question gets interesting for anyone who invests, because a dividend you build yourself doesn't come once. It comes every year you own the shares, and if the companies behind it keep growing, it gets bigger over time.

How much do you need invested to earn $5,000 a year in dividends?

You need somewhere between $50,000 and $142,900 invested, depending on the yield you collect. The formula is the annual income you want divided by the yield, so $5,000 divided by 0.07 is $71,400.

Every number in the ladder below is my own math using that formula.

Going from 3.5% to 10% cuts the capital you need by almost two thirds, which is a big reason high-yield funds are such a large part of how I get paid, since at 10% a year $50,000 produces the same $5,000 that would take nearly $143,000 in a fund paying 3.5%.

The second thing is that none of these numbers need you to be rich. $50,000 is a lot of money, but it’s a number a regular person with a job can reach, and I walked through a starting portfolio at almost exactly that size in How To Build A Portfolio That Eventually Produces $5K A Month.

The yield you pick also decides how the income behaves later. A 3.5% payer usually raises its dividend every year, so your $5,000 turns into $5,500 and then $6,000 without another dollar from you. A 10% payer hands you more today and gets you to the finish line faster.

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What does $5,000 a year look like paid monthly or weekly?

$5,000 a year is about $417 a month, or roughly $96 a week if you own funds that pay weekly.

$417 a month covers a car payment for a lot of people, or phone, internet and groceries together. Picking one bill and building a portfolio big enough to cover it is how I’d tell anyone to start, and I walked through the basics of getting that first payment in Here’s How To Get Paid A Dividend.

Weekly payers take the rhythm even further. A fund like QDTY pays every single week, so you’ve got cash coming in on a schedule that looks more like a paycheck than a quarterly statement, and that steady flow works as a buffer when something unexpected comes up. You don’t have to sell shares to cover a surprise bill when next week’s payment is already on the way.

Stretch that out over a decade and the gap between a check that comes once and a check that comes every year gets hard to ignore. Even if your own $5,000 never grows a single dollar, ten years of it adds up to $50,000 collected, which is my own math on a flat payment with no raises at all.

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Which kinds of funds get you there fastest?

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Most high yield funds pay you by slowly handing back your own capital. The payout shrinks, the share price bleeds, and you end up with less money working for you every year. This fund does the opposite, and the reason comes down to how it writes its calls.

The NAV HAS INCREASED here— which is why I’m excited to share it with you all.

I ran a backtest on it. $50,000 at launch with every payment reinvested grew annual income from $4,777 to $6,024 in two years, without adding a single dollar. It yields about 8.75% and pays monthly, and paid subs get the ticker, the holdings and the tax breakdown below. I went through the wider group of these funds in I Analyzed 10 Option Income ETFs.

👉 Upgrade Your Subscription for $0.82 a day and get every buy alert first, plus the funds paying my bills.

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Why Most Monthly Payers Shrink

A typical option income fund buys a basket of stocks and then sells call options against those exact stocks. Each call hands away the gains above a set price, so when the market runs, the fund pockets a premium and gives up the rally. That trade works well in a flat year and badly over several, because the share price gets stuck while the payouts keep drawing down capital.

The problem is that the yields offered by these income ETFs are often times unsustainable. This is where NAV erosion comes in.

This fund has INCREASED ITS NAV since inception and total AUM continues to rise because of the success.

Two design choices account for that gap. It caps far less of its upside than its peers do, and it owns stocks chosen because they keep raising their own dividends.

For instance, it was determined that this fund was still able to capture ~73% of the monthly upside of the market, unlike most other option ETFs.

The fund also offers a starting dividend yield of about 8.7%.

So $10,000 invested will earn you about $870 annually.

$100,000 invested earns you $8,700 annually.

$1M invested earns you $87,000 annually. You get the idea.

The monthly distribution grew 15.78% over the past year and 6.86% a year across three years, according to stockinvest.us, with the June payment coming in at $0.204 a share. The fund has an excellent track record of keeping distributions within a tight range. So if you care about income stability, this would be a great fund to consider.

The fund we’re highlighting today is the…

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In 306 BC a man named Epicurus bought a plot of land outside Athens and started teaching there. Every other school in the city met in public where anyone walking past could listen in, and he bought private ground instead, so the school became known simply as the Garden. The food there was water and barley bread most days, the community was built around a small circle of friends rather than public reputation, and the claim carved on the gate was:

“Pleasure Is The Highest Good”

That last line wrecked him because rivals ran with it and spread stories that the Garden was a house of drunken excess. Epicurus died in 270 BC having written around 300 works.

What got buried under that is a rigorous system for deciding what to want, and it works on money. Think about it: you work hard for money and that should be used for pleasure, right?

Well, Epicurus believed that there’s a systematic way to obtain that pleasure through disciplined actions. Pleasure without limits is dangerous. This is the philosophy I want you to operate from financially.

What Money Is Actually For

The target Epicurus named was ataraxia, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines as happiness resulting from the absence of physical pain and mental disturbance. The goal was a life where the alarm bells stop ringing. Every other thing he taught exists to get you there and keep you there, which makes it a strange kind of hedonism, one where the win condition is the disappearance of a feeling, rather than the arrival of one.

Getting there took discipline about what you allow yourself to want. His letter to Menoeceus states the rule directly: we do not choose every pleasure, because some cost more in pain than they return once the full bill arrives. You measure the consequence before you take the reward.

Applied to money, that rips apart most of what people buy, because the car payment and the bigger house and the upgraded everything are all pleasures that bill you monthly for years in exchange for a feeling that fades in about six weeks.

We see this all the time. Sign up for the car payment because the thrill and pleasure of a new car is greater than the pain of a monthly debt, insurance, and maintenance. People buy more house than they can afford because it has the white picket fence, large bedrooms, and double-door garage.

They are accepting pleasure at the cost of pain.

The thing worth buying instead is the absence of the hum. The Federal Reserve surveys households every October about how they would handle a surprise bill, and in the most recent report, 63% of adults said they could cover an unexpected $400 expense with cash or its equivalent. Meaning that roughly one in three adults is a single car repair from a credit card balance, and that produces a background anxiety that no amount of positive thinking removes and no promotion fully fixes either.

The simple idea is to live on less than you need. Desire for more is what creates suffering and stress. Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t want more. I want more. It’s human nature. What I am saying is that you need to stay disciplined to make sure the more doesn’t come at the detriment of your peace and security.

This is why I put so much value on dividends.

High Yield Database

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Why I Want The Money In Cash Flow

Once you accept that the job of money is removing disturbance, the FORM the money takes starts to matter as much as the size of it. A balance sitting in an account is potential, and potential doesn’t pay a utility bill or calm anyone down during a rough month. Cash landing in the account on a schedule does both, and that difference is the entire reason I built an income portfolio instead of a pile.

I collected nearly $5K in dividends during August because of the dividend wheel strategy.

The cadence matters too. Bills arrive constantly rather than quarterly, so income that shows up at the same rhythm covers life the way it’s actually lived.

A fund like QDTY, the YieldMax Nasdaq 100 0DTE Covered Call Strategy ETF , sells zero-days-to-expiration calls on the Nasdaq 100 against synthetic exposure to the index and aims to distribute what it collects every week. Weekly payments turn a portfolio into something closer to a paycheck, and a paycheck you don’t have to show up for is the most direct purchase of ataraxia available.

For instance, I collect roughly $132 a week from this position. I don’t have to work for it, report to a manager, or even be awake. Is it the best income position? Probably not. But the point is that it creates the absence of hum. An extra $6k-$7k in passive income reduces your vulnerability to the noise.

I hold this position as a buffer layer rather than as the whole structure, sized so that the weekly cash covers a defined slice of fixed costs while growth positions handle the compounding. I compared ten of these funds side by side in this piece if you want the mechanics rather than the philosophy.

👉 Want more high yield funds like these? Read this!

No One Is Coming, So Build

Epicurus didn’t wait for Athens to arrange a decent life for him. He bought ground, built a self-sufficient community on it, and stepped out of a status game whose rules he never agreed to. The modern version is accepting that no employer or market is arriving with the structure you need, which hands you total responsibility for the result and puts every lever back within reach.

Americans filed 578,926 applications to start a business in July 2026, according to the Census Bureau, up 8.1% from June. Most of those will never hire a single employee, but yet, trying is still the right instinct. Because the alternative is letting a 3% raise from a job decide what your work is worth.

Your portfolio needs the same treatment. An account on autopilot runs on default settings, and you get whatever those settings hand you. In plain English, it means you need to put effort and TRY to build your portfolio. Pay attention to how money works. Understand different ETFs. Put actual effort into building your wealth.

Do you really just want to be average and buy the S&P 500 without actually understanding how anything works? Just put money into your 401k without a purpose? Put some real effort in and do something that will increase the quality of your life.

The Garden Was The Whole Strategy

The most radical thing about that plot of land was how small the ambition looked from outside. Epicurus wasn’t trying to reform the city, he pulled a small group of people close and treated friendship as one of the few things worth organizing a life around, which read as retreat to a culture obsessed with standing.

Your compass should point the same direction. The duty you recognize should run to a short list of people, meaning you don’t have to change the world or have an obligation to some sort of bigger worldview. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed people since 1938, and its director Robert Waldinger says the finding that surprised researchers most was that the warmth of people’s close relationships predicted who stayed happy and healthy into old age better than anything else they measured.

The cash buffer exists so a bad year never becomes a conversation at a kitchen table, and multiple income streams exist so one breaking doesn’t take the house with it. If your only income is your job, you’re letting a company decide your fate and wellbeing. Get fired and now you’re on LinkedIn begging for an opportunity.

A small circle sounds cold until you notice that someone with a secure base gives away far more over a lifetime than someone permanently one repair bill from panic. How many of your parents can’t afford to leave you with anything? Don’t you want to change the cycle?

Your Hardware Is Running On Old Settings

Your own brain will try to talk you out of all of this the first time the market drops. Randolph Nesse, an evolutionary psychiatrist, argued in a paper for the Royal Society that we were never built to be happy, and that our good and bad feelings exist to push us into action rather than to be enjoyed or avoided. Fear kept your ancestors alive because panicking over nothing cost them a few wasted minutes while missing a real threat cost them everything, and that same wiring is now watching your account balance.

In short, I’m saying that panic is expensive. Especially panic around money.

Morningstar compares every year what funds returned against what the average investor in those funds actually earned, and the 2026 study found investors made 8.7% a year over the decade through 2025 while the funds themselves returned 9.9%. That missing 1.2 points came entirely from buying and selling at the wrong moments. Crypto ETF investors did far worse and lost around 5.8% a year while the funds gained 8.5%, because the money showed up after the run and left during the drop.

The fix costs nothing.

A UCLA team led by Matthew Lieberman scanned people’s brains while they put names to emotional images, and found that saying what you feel calms the brain’s fear center and wakes up the part that thinks in words instead. Say it out loud before you touch the account, something as basic as “I am scared right now,” and then ask the only question that actually matters, which is whether the fund or the business changed. A falling chart on its own tells you nothing about that.

Actions To Take This Week

1. Price your freedom. Add up one month of fixed bills, then divide by 0.08 for the capital that covers them at an 8% yield. That number is what autonomy costs, and it’s a target instead of a mood.
   

2. Match the cadence to the bills. Write down when your income actually lands against when the money actually leaves. Gaps in that calendar are where the anxiety lives, and weekly or monthly payers are the tool for closing them.
   

3. Automate one deposit. Treat it as a bill with a due date rather than whatever is left at month end. The figure matters less than it leaving without a decision.
   

4. Write down who the money is for. Names, not concepts. Then check that your beneficiaries, cash buffer and income streams match the list.
   

5. Name the feeling before you trade. Out loud, in plain words, every time the account moves hard. Practice it on traffic and rude emails first, because it’s useless the first time you try it at a market bottom.

Epicurus lost the public argument so completely that his name now advertises the behavior he spent his life warning against, and the system itself held up fine. Measure every pleasure against the bill that follows it, convert wealth into cash that shows up on a schedule, build the structure yourself because nobody is bringing you one, keep the circle small and make it secure, and treat the alarm in your chest as a suggestion rather than an order. That is the entire playbook, and it still works.

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Memory stocks went vertical earlier this year and have since pulled back hard, and the reason the setup still works is that the shortage has stopped being a price spike and become a schedule. The companies that make memory have sold next year’s output already, the new factories don’t produce until 2028, and the biggest customers have said publicly that they need more memory per chip in 2027 than they use today.

One fund owns the memory maker, the companies that build memory factories, AND the companies buying all the memory, in roughly equal weights, and it pays out every week. The shortage comes first, then the fund.

What A Shortage Looks Like On An Invoice

The clearest way to see this is one part number. A 64GB server memory module cost about $450 in the fourth quarter of 2025. By the first quarter of this year it was over $900, and TrendForce data expected it above $1,000 by the second quarter.

TrendForce started the year expecting conventional DRAM contract prices to rise 55 to 60% in the first quarter, then revised that to 90 to 95% once the negotiations actually closed. The second quarter added another 58 to 63% on top. By the third quarter the increase slowed to 13 to 18%, and the reason it slowed is telling. PC and phone makers reached the limit of what they could pay and started walking away from orders.

Suppliers are behaving the way you'd expect when they hold every card. Samsung went into third-quarter talks asking for up to another 20%, and some memory quotes now expire after 72 hours because sellers don't want to lock a price they think will be higher next week. That is a market where the seller has stopped guessing and started dictating.

Conventional DRAM reprices every quarter, which is why you've already seen it double. High bandwidth memory, the kind stacked directly onto AI accelerators, reprices once a year. The 2026 HBM contracts were signed before the squeeze fully hit, so the price everyone is paying today reflects last year's market.

Those 2027 agreements are being negotiated right now, and TrendForce’s September bulletin describes them as deadlocked, with buyers and sellers still arguing over specifications while prices retain what it calls substantial room to grow. Its June research went further and said HBM contract prices could move multiples higher when the 2027 agreements land.

Demand steps up at the same time. Nvidia’s Rubin Ultra platform, due in 2027, carries 384GB of HBM per GPU against 288GB on the current generation, and the custom AI chips that Google and others are deploying are scaling up their memory content too. So the buyers need more memory per chip, the contracts reprice into a shortage, and the factories that would fix it don’t reach volume until 2028 or 2029 according to SK hynix’s own expansion timeline.

The exact price matters less than the gap between when demand rises and when supply arrives, and every published date puts that gap at two years.

Getting Paid On Both The Problem And The Fix

Owning a single memory maker means betting on which one wins the most HBM share, and that answer has flipped between the big three more than once. Owning only the chipmakers that buy memory means eating the cost increase. One fund does neither, because it holds every side of this at once.

This fund has outperformed the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 since inception.

It owns Micron, which collects when prices double. It owns Lam Research and KLA, which sell the equipment every new memory fab is built with, so they get paid when the industry tries to fix the shortage. And it owns Nvidia, Broadcom and AMD, which pass higher memory costs into accelerators customers are lining up to buy anyway. Roughly 25 names at near-equal weights, so no single bet dominates.

Then it sells call spreads against those holdings and pays out the premium every week. Semiconductors have been the most volatile corner of the market this year, and volatility is exactly what an option seller gets paid for. The more the memory debate whipsaws these stocks, the fatter the weekly check.

That's $200 to $290 every week on a $25,000 position, arriving whether the memory stocks are up or down that week. The ticker, the holdings, and what that income actually costs are below the line.

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Interestingly, Amazon is still above its 12-month average share price range. Despite this, I’m going to continue accumulating shares.

So I’m adding $15,000 to the position by December 31, and every dollar of it comes from covered call premiums and capital my income portfolio throws off. Assuming that I can achieve passive income of $5,000 like I did in August, I believe I’ll be able to accumulate $15k more of AMZN relatively quickly.

I’m not going to repeat the four-business breakdown or the operating income math from last time, since that’s all in the earlier piece and none of it changed. What follows is what’s new, plus the part of the thesis I think I undersold.

I think Amazon is one of the clearest AI investments and it doesn’t require a stupid amount of risk. Accumulate shares and stay patient! Not to mention, AMZN has a sizeable stake in Anthropic.

Here’s why AMZN is a great stock right now…

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That number was usually about 3%, but sometimes it was also nothing.

Most people who try to fix this set the goal wrong on day one. They try to increase their active income, without ever building a stream of income that isn’t correlated to their time. Dividends are the easiest way to build that income stream and it doesn’t require you to build a business, manage anything, or even pay attention to it. If anything, dividends should serve as the motivation to start investing your income.

You Already Have Two Employers

You want to learn how to start investing into the stock market and earn dividends, you can start with the article below. New free subscribers also get an email that continues a list of ETFs that may be great for beginners.

Every dollar you own in a dividend paying position is a coworker that shows up, does its job, and hands you money without a performance review. The whole strategy comes down to shifting your income from the employer that can fire you to the one that can’t. Dividends get paid to you regardless of the economy and isn’t dependent on your time and effort. You can go to sleep and wakeup with new dividends deposited into your account. You just need to understand where to put the money.

For instance, I collect a few thousand in dividends every month, which serves as safety against unexpected issues. My car needs some repairs and I don’t have cash? Dividends can be tapped into. If I go on vacation, I’ll still be getting paid without actually producing anything. Dividends can be a cheat code but it takes patience to build them up over time.

Look at the raise policy first, because it’s the thing that made me start. My job gave me 3% and I had to earn it in a room full of people deciding my worth. You ever worked your ass off and didn’t get a raise for the effort? Or how about when a coworker quits and now you have to pickup the slack without any extra pay?

Well, my portfolio gives me a raise every time a company inside it grows earnings, and a second raise every time I add capital, and neither one requires anybody’s permission.

Then look at the firing risk. Employer A can end your income in a single meeting you didn’t see coming. Dividends can’t fire you.

The worst that can happen to a dividend is that it gets reduced, and you can see that coming in the filings months ahead if you’re paying attention. I wrote about building income that survives a downturn in The Recession Proof Dividend Structure.

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The Yield Decides How Long It Takes

So how much money do you need to start earning dividends? Well, you can technically start with as little as a dollar. However, the amount you invest into the market has a direct reflection on dividends that you can collect.

The decision comes down to you. Treat your investing like it’s a bill. If you can commit $500 to a car payment every month, but not $500 to your investment account, you are hustling backwards and keeping yourself financially stuck.

Meanwhile, $500 a month into an investment account can build some serious wealth over time.

The formula is: Amount x Yield = Dividend Income

You can create a $500 a month income stream with as little as $43k invested. Of course, this isn’t the most optimal way to invest and it isn’t a recommendation. This is just a conceptual idea to help you understand the power of where your capital is being allocated.

An index fund at 1.3% needs almost half a million dollars to cover one car payment, which is why the “just buy VOO” crowd talks about quitting at 55. My portfolio sits mostly in the 8% to 12% range, across the funds I covered in I Analyzed 10 Option Income ETFs and Low Risk 10% Dividend Yield From One Fund.

Right now there’s one fund I’m adding to more than any other, and it exists because of the fuel crisis. Crude went above $90 in March when the Strait of Hormuz got constrained, gasoline is up 27% year over year, and everyone is guessing where oil goes next. This fund doesn’t care where oil goes, and it pays me every month.

Here’s the fund that I think will perform well through the remainder of the year..

I initiated a buy alert on this fund at the beginning of the year and it has done well since.

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The company that I am highlighting has increased its dividend by 225% over the last decade. So if you invested in this company for ten years, your annual dividend income would have more than tripled.

Walk through any grocery store right now and pay attention to what actually goes into people’s carts. The store brand sits on the shelf next to the name brand, usually a couple of dollars cheaper, and more often than it used to, it’s the one that goes in the cart.

Costco is a good example of this — people love Kirkland products because it offers quality at a discounted price. Times are changing and consumers are more open to buying store brands, especially if the quality is the same or better than national brands. When I go to Costco, I walk right past the Poland Springs water and grab the Kirkland water instead.

It’s all seems to operate in cycles. Groceries get expensive, people switch to the cheap version to get through it, and then wages catch up and the big brands run promotions until everyone comes back. Store brands would pick up a point or two of market share during the rough stretch and hand it right back when things improved. That pattern held for about three decades, through every recession anyone reading this has lived through.

What broke the pattern is that none of that happened this round. Store brands took 23.8% of every item sold in American grocery stores in the first half of 2026, which is a record, while national brand unit sales actually fell 0.5%. That is happening with employment strong and wages rising, which is exactly when the old pattern says people should be trading back up.

I believe this is an opportunity for investors to accumulate high quality consumer businesses at a discount. The company I am highlighting today trades at a lower forward price-to-earnings ratio than its average range over the last three years. Buying at a discount is my specialty, so I will be adding shares here as well.

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What Actually Changed In The Cart

Bank of America tracks card spending across its entire customer base, and in July total spending per household was up 5.0% from a year earlier. In that same month, after-tax wage growth for lower income households passed higher income households for the first time since December 2024.

People have more money than they did and they are still buying the store brand, which makes this a clear customer preference. So the question worth answering is how a preference like that forms, because preferences are a lot harder to reverse than a budget problem.

I think it all starts as a price decision. Grocery inflation ran into double digits in 2022, people reached for the cheaper version to get through the month, and everyone in the industry treated that as a temporary trade. What nobody accounted for is that the products had gotten good. Retailers had spent years upgrading their own lines while the national brands were busy raising prices, so the shopper who grabbed the store brand yogurt out of necessity opened it, ate it, and could not tell the difference.

Once that happens, there is no going back to paying thirty percent more for the label.

People will stretch a grocery budget in a dozen places before they downgrade what they feed the dog or what they pour on a Friday night. When store brands start winning there, you are watching people buy what they actually want.

The obvious pushback is that people are going broke and putting groceries on a credit card. The data says the opposite.

Households in all three income groups are paying off more of their balances than they were, not less. Nobody is funding groceries with revolving debt and then choosing the cheap yogurt out of desperation. They just prefer it now.

Aldi and Trader Joe’s run roughly three quarters store brand by volume, so a shopper who grew up in those aisles never had national brand loyalty to lose. For them the store brand is simply what the product is, and the name brand is the more expensive thing sitting beside it.

Store brands now take nearly 39 cents of every dollar spent in the refrigerated aisle. That’s the center of the store and the highest traffic section in the building. Ten years ago everyone assumed dairy and deli were too personal for shoppers to give up.

One large American grocer reported earnings yesterday. Its own private label line grew more than 14% in the quarter.

I’ll name the company below.

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Key Takeaways

• Heading into 2027, a married couple with no other income can collect at least $131,100 of qualified dividends and owe $0 federal income tax; a couple both 65+ can collect at least $146,400.
  

• Only qualified dividends get the 0% rate: paid by U.S. corporations and held more than 60 days. Most covered call, REIT, and bond income does not qualify.
  

• Crossing the threshold taxes only the overflow at 15%, never the income beneath it. This applies to federal tax; states set their own rules.

Every dollar you earn at a job gets taxed before you ever touch it. Federal withholding comes out ahead of the deposit, payroll taxes take their slice off the top, and the ordinary brackets climb as high as 37%. It’s almost like you’re getting punished for earning more.

This is why dividends are a bit of a necessity in modern life. Collect a qualified dividend and there’s potential for no taxes to be paid. You can get raises on that dividend income and still pay no taxes.

Get a raise at work and you’re paying a larger tax bill.

Dividends run through a different rulebook and wages sit in the harshest lane no matter how hard you worked for them. Qualified dividends get their own rate ladder, and the bottom rung of that ladder is 0%. This difference is exactly why I advocate investing on a continuous basis, every paycheck, in every market: each purchase converts a slice of the most-taxed income there is into ownership income, and as your dividend income grows, a rising share of what you collect can arrive with no federal tax on it at all.

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How Much Dividend Income Will Be Tax-Free In 2027?

At least $65,550 for single filers and $131,100 for married couples filing jointly, rising to at least $73,600 and $146,400 for filers 65 and older. Those are the confirmed 2026 ceilings and the floor for 2027: thresholds index up with inflation, the official 2027 figures land around late October 2026, and published projections point 2% to 3% higher.

Each ceiling is the standard deduction stacked under the 0% qualified dividend bracket, per Revenue Procedure 2025-32. The 65+ rows also include the age add-on and the $6,000-per-person senior deduction that runs through 2028 for couples under $150,000 of income.

A retired couple can collect $146,400 in qualified dividends, more than double the median household income.

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After some portfolio shifts, I am now estimated to collect roughly $37,000 in dividends over the next twelve months. Of this total, I anticipate that my overall tax burden will be quite low.

What Counts As A Qualified Dividend?

A qualified dividend is paid by a U.S. corporation (or qualified foreign company) on shares you held more than 60 day.

Regular readers will notice the highest-yielding rows fail the test, and I hold plenty of income that fails it (see my breakdown of 10 option income ETFs). That income runs on a different tax lane: return of capital defers tax by lowering your cost basis rather than exempting anything, and the eventual long-term gain can land on the 0% shelf later.

How Does The 0% Dividend Bracket Actually Work?

Your ordinary income fills the tax brackets first, and qualified dividends stack on top, taxed at the rate of whatever space they land in.

Ordinary income = job income.

The standard deduction wipes the first $32,200 off a couple’s return before any bracket applies, then the 0% tier covers taxable income up to $98,900. A couple with $70,000 of ordinary income has $28,900 of free shelf left. Every dollar of wages, interest, or non-qualified distributions you take pushes a qualified dollar off the shelf, which is why controlling the REST of your return is the whole game.

The myth that scares people off: crossing the line does NOT blow up the deal. The brackets work like floors of a building, so a couple who lands $2,000 over the threshold pays 15% on the $2,000 of overflow and still pays 0% on the entire $98,900 beneath it.

A couple filling the whole shelf saves over $14,800 a year versus the 15% tier by my math, so aim for the neighborhood, not the dollar.

How Is Return Of Capital From Option ETFs Taxed?

Return of capital distributions aren’t taxed in the year you receive them; they reduce your cost basis instead, deferring the bill until you sell. This is the lane most of my regular readers actually live in, because option income ETFs classify a large share of their monthly payouts as ROC on their 19a-1 notices and year-end tax documents. The cash hits your account like any other distribution; the difference is that no 1099 line taxes it now, and your recorded cost in the shares steps down by the same amount instead. Your broker tracks the adjustment, and it’s worth verifying on your statement once a year.

Here’s where this lane and the 0% shelf converge, and it’s the most underrated part of the whole strategy. Every ROC dollar you collect lowers your basis, and a lower basis manufactures a bigger capital gain the day you sell, long-term if you’ve held past a year. Long-term gains ride the exact same 0/15/20 ladder as qualified dividends, third row of the audit table above.

So a patient investor can collect double-digit option income for years with nothing due at receip. Deferred tax that ultimately lands on the free shelf stops being deferred and becomes erased.

Tax-Free Dividend Questions, Answered

How much dividend income will be tax-free in 2027?

At least $65,550 for a single filer and $131,100 for a married couple filing jointly, assuming qualified dividends are the only income; filers 65 and older can reach at least $73,600 and $146,400. Those are the confirmed 2026 ceilings, and the official 2027 thresholds will land at or above them.

When does the IRS announce the official 2027 thresholds?

Around late October 2026, in its annual inflation-adjustment revenue procedure. I’ll update the tables here the week the numbers drop.

What makes a dividend “qualified”?

It must come from a U.S. corporation or qualified foreign company, and you must hold the shares more than 60 days within the 121-day window around the ex-dividend date. Both tests are mechanical; miss either and the payment is taxed as ordinary income.

Do covered call ETF distributions get the 0% rate?

Mostly no. Option premium isn’t a corporate dividend, so those distributions largely arrive as ordinary income or return of capital. ROC defers tax by lowering your cost basis instead, a different mechanism I covered in this 10% yielder piece.

What happens if my income goes over the threshold?

Only the overflow gets taxed, at 15%. The brackets are floors, so going $2,000 over costs about $300 while everything beneath the line stays at 0%.

Is this really tax-free, or just federal?

Federal. Most states tax dividends as ordinary income under their own rules, and Social Security inclusion and health subsidy calculations can still be affected. Confirm your full picture with a tax professional.

Wages across the whole country grew 3.2% in the twelve months to June 2026 according to the BLS, and consumer prices rose 3.4% over the twelve months to July, so the national raise didn’t even keep pace with the cost of living. That’s the deal most people are working under, and it’s the deal I hated enough to start buying dividend stocks in 2018.

Now, my invested money gets double-digit raises every year and I wanted to share 4 of these companies with you. When you’re an investor, you can get dividend raises and this changed my perception of money. I didn’t want to let a manager or a job dictate my financial well-being, so I wanted to create my own raises using my own capital.

So I created a second income stream using dividends and this income has experienced annual raises on its own. The portfolio doesn’t have to work, report to a manager, do one-on-ones, or sit in traffic.

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While I was getting a 3% raise, the biggest companies in the country were giving their shareholders raises three and four times that size.

So I ran a screen for exactly that: companies big enough that the raises aren’t a one-time thing, growing their dividends fast enough that the income actually outruns inflation, with no missed or cut payments in ten years.

Four names cleared every bar, and I’ll walk through each one with the numbers behind the raise. If you’ve ever sat through a 3% raise meeting and felt the math wasn’t on your side, this is the other side of that math.

Key takeaways

• Four $100B+ companies grew their regular dividends 10.2% to 14.9% a year from 2020 to 2025, against a 3.2% national wage increase.

• All four have paid an uninterrupted quarterly dividend from 2017 through their latest 2026 declaration.

• None of the four spends more than 41% of free cash flow on the dividend, which is the room for the next raise.

• The catch is yield: 0.64% to 0.73% today. These are raise machines rather than income machines, and I explain where they fit next to the 10% payers I own.

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Stop Chasing The Work Raises

Employers budgeted a 3.5% total salary increase for 2026, the same figure they actually paid in 2025, with merit raises at 3.2%. Mercer surveyed those companies in late 2025 and the headline was that nobody planned to raise the number. Put that next to the 3.4% rise in consumer prices and the average worker’s real raise this year rounds to zero.

What changed my mind about money was noticing that the dividend on a stock I owned had been raised by more in one announcement than my salary had been raised in three years. That’s what pushed me to build the habit of investing every paycheck, which is how I got to $100K by the time I was 25.

The chart below is that budget next to what four companies paid their owners over the same stretch.

👉 The four companies are:

Visa

Costco

Broadcom

Microsoft

Microsoft: The Slowest Raise, The Safest Check

Microsoft grew its dividend 10.2% a year from 2020 to 2025, the slowest of the four, and it’s also the one I own the most of. The most recent raise took the quarterly payment from $0.83 to $0.91, a 9.6% bump, on the November 2025 ex-date.

If you pay for Microsoft 365 or your company runs on Azure, you’re one of the customers funding that raise, which is a strange thing to think about the first time.

Revenue was $331.8B in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2026, up from $281.7B the year before and $168.1B in FY2021. Earnings growing 17.4% while the dividend grows 10.2% means the payout ratio has been shrinking even as the check gets bigger, and that’s the healthiest version of a raise a company can give.

Not only would you be getting raises, but you’d have grown your capital by more than 53%.

The AI buildout decides how fast the raises come, and it has almost no bearing on whether they come at all. I went deep on that spending in Microsoft Is Extremely Undervalued.

Visa: A Raise On Every Swipe

Visa’s dividend went from $1.22 a share in 2020 to $2.44 in 2025, an exact doubling in five years and a 14.9% compound rate. The latest raise moved the quarterly payment from $0.59 to $0.67, or 13.6%, on the November 2025 ex-date. Every time you tap a card at a coffee shop, a small fee runs through this network, and that fee is what funds the raise.

The reason Visa can keep raising this fast comes down to how little it costs to run a payments network. Capex was $1.5B in FY2025 against $23.1B of operating cash flow, so 94% of the cash the business generates is free cash. Revenue of $40.0B turned into $19.9B of net income, a 50% net margin, and the $4.6B dividend consumed only 21% of free cash flow.

The rest of the cash goes to buybacks. Visa repurchased $13.4B of stock in FY2025, and the diluted share count has dropped from 2.22B to 1.97B since FY2020, an 11.6% reduction. Every share that disappears makes the next raise cheaper, because the same total dividend dollars get split across fewer owners.

Broadcom: Paid On Every AI Server

Broadcom’s dividend grew 12.6% a year from 2020 to 2025, and its revenue grew 21.7% a year over the same period, the fastest top line of the four. The latest raise took the quarterly payout from $0.59 to $0.65, a 10.2% increase, on the December 2025 ex-date. Broadcom designs custom AI chips and the networking gear inside the data centers that budgets like Microsoft’s $115.9B of capex are paying for, so in a real sense one company on this list is helping fund another’s raise.

The honest weakness is that Broadcom carries the highest payout of the four at 41% of free cash flow, and the diluted share count went the wrong way, from 4.21B to 4.85B, because VMware was partly paid for in stock.

Each raise now has to be spread across more shares. The offset is that free cash flow grew 39% in FY2025 while the dividend bill grew 14%, so coverage improved despite the extra shares. I laid out why I’m bullish on the spending behind this in I’m Betting On 2027 And Collecting 11%.

Costco: The Membership You Already Pay For

Costco raised its quarterly dividend from $1.30 to $1.47 in May 2026, a 13.1% increase, and the regular payout has compounded at 13.0% a year since 2020. If you hand Costco a membership fee every year, you already understand the business: people pay to get in, then keep coming back, and the renewal rate makes the revenue behave like a subscription.

The trade-off is the yield: at the Sep 4 close of $915.74, the $5.88 forward dividend yields 0.64%, the lowest of the four. You’re paying up for the most reliable raise in the group, and whether that’s worth it depends on what job you’re giving the stock. I’ll get to that in section 09, because it’s the question that decides whether any of these four belong in your portfolio.

What A 13% Raise Does Over Five Years

A 3% raise on $60,000 turns into $69,556 after five years, my calculation, and that’s before inflation takes most of it back. Run the same $60,000 through Visa’s 14.9% dividend growth rate and you land at $120,158.

This shows you what the gap between 3% and 13% means in dollars, and the gap is the entire reason I’d rather own the raise than negotiate for one.

The raise machines belong next to the income funds in a portfolio rather than in place of them. My portfolio pays me a real monthly check from the 10% payers, and I reported $4,918 in August. The dividend growers are the sleeve that makes sure that check is bigger in 2031 than it is now. If you only own the high yielders, your income is flat forever, which is the exact problem with a 3% raise wearing a different outfit.

How To Start This Week

Any broker’s stock screener will filter by market cap and dividend growth, and the dividend history for each company is on its investor relations page. Here’s the order I’d do it in.

1. Pull your last three raises and write down the average. Most people land near the 3.2% national figure. That number is your benchmark, and any dividend growth rate below it isn’t worth your time.

2. Screen for market cap above $100B and five-year dividend growth between 10% and 15%. You’ll get a short list, so cut anything above 15% (usually a payout ratio catching up) and anything below 10% (not beating your raise by enough).

3. Check ten years of payments on each survivor. One skipped or reduced quarter since 2017 disqualifies it. This takes five minutes per company on the investor relations page.

4. Divide dividends paid by free cash flow from the latest cash flow statement. Under 50% means there’s room for the next raise. Over 75% means the raise is coming out of something else.

5. Buy one and hold it through at least two raise announcements before judging it.

If the individual stock route feels like too much, a dividend growth ETF does the screening for you at the cost of some growth. I reviewed the two most popular ones in Vanguard VIG Review and Is DGRO Still One Of The Best, and you can check whether these four sit in the top holdings before you buy. The trade is simpler execution for a growth rate that averages in the slower payers too.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a dividend growth stock?

A dividend growth stock is a company that raises its dividend per share every year, usually because earnings are growing and the payout ratio is low enough to leave room. The four in this article (Microsoft, Visa, Broadcom and Costco) raised their regular dividends 10.2% to 14.9% a year from 2020 to 2025 with no missed payments since 2017.

Which large companies grow their dividends 10% or more a year?

From a screen of NYSE and Nasdaq companies above $100B market cap, run Sep 6, 2026: Visa (14.9%), Mastercard (13.7%), Costco (13.0%), Broadcom (12.6%), UnitedHealth (12.5%) and Microsoft (10.2%) all grew regular dividends per share between 10% and 15% a year from 2020 to 2025. Lowe’s grew faster at 15.9% and Home Depot slower at 8.9%.

Is a 0.7% dividend yield worth owning?

Only if you’re buying the growth rate rather than the income. At 0.64% to 0.73%, $100,000 across these four pays about $700 a year today (my calculation). At the trailing growth rates that income doubles in roughly five to seven years. For income you need this year, a higher-yielding fund is the better tool.

How is five-year dividend CAGR calculated?

Take the regular dividends per share paid in calendar 2025, divide by the amount paid in calendar 2020, and raise the result to the power of one fifth, then subtract one. Special dividends are excluded. For Visa: ($2.44 ÷ $1.22)^(1/5) − 1 = 14.9%.

How much did wages grow in 2026?

The BLS Employment Cost Index shows wages and salaries for civilian workers up 3.2% in the twelve months to June 2026, and 3.1% for private industry. Mercer’s survey found employers budgeting 3.5% total salary increases for 2026, unchanged from 2025. Consumer prices rose 3.4% in the twelve months to July 2026.

Admittedly, covered call income made up nearly half of this total.

Dividends came in at $2,600.45, up 20% from July’s $2,167.88.

Now the biggest downfall to this update…

My Yieldly Dashboard now projects $36,941 in dividend income over the next twelve months. So I gave up somewhere around ~$7,000 a year of projected payouts in one month. HOWEVER, this is temporary — I’ll dive into those details.

The reason I have been selling the high yield ETFs is to fuel growth positions, which has worked out so far. The latest example of this would be my position in Robinhood .

I bought Robinhood at an average of $83.38 a share back in May. The position is worth $15,592 today against a $10,423.83 cost basis, or a 49.58% gain. By my own math, the same $10,424 parked in a fund paying 10% would have produced about $1,042 a year, so HOOD handed me close to five years of high-yield income in a single summer.

That's the loop I'm running now, and it's the same one I described when I first wrote up the dividend wheel. Growth names compound, I write covered calls against the ones with rich premiums, and when a position gets well ahead of itself I take the gain and convert it into income.

👉 Here’s what this report covers:

• Every position that paid me in August, with July next to it so you can see exactly what moved.

• The three covered call contracts that produced $2,317.56 and the one still open.

• Why the annual projection fell to $36,941, the four positions I sold, and how much capital that freed up.

• Where every dollar went, position by position, straight from my brokerage export.

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Sell Alert: 4 Positions Out

I sold four positions in August:

1. YieldMax S&P 500 0DTE Covered Call Strategy ETF

2. Kroger

3. YieldMax Universe Fund of Option Income ETFs

4. Bloom Energy .

The three income names had one problem in common. SDTY paid 22% on my cost and the shares were only up 3.35%.

KR paid 2.62% and grows it slowly.

YMAX paid me $3,075 a year on $11,042 invested, and I sold the shares for $4,264, a 61% loss (not including all dividends paid).

BE is the opposite case. I alerted it in December, put in $6,711.75, and sold at $14,999.55 for an $8,287.80 gain, up 123%. The gain by itself is bigger than the whole SDTY position or the whole KR position, and it covers the YMAX loss with room to spare, so I took the profit and moved it into growth names that haven’t run yet.

At some point in the next few years that same capital gets sold again and goes into a fund paying 8% to 10%, and the income it produces at that point will be a multiple of anything SDTY or KR could ever have paid on the original dollars.

With that being said, I plan to eventually rotate more capital into traditional dividend growth companies! Stay tuned for those released!

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Who Paid Me In August

The following positions paid me a dividend in August:

• Yieldmax Nasdaq Option ETF : $512.54

• Yieldmax MSFT Option ETF : $461.94

• Cornerstone Strategic Investment Fund : $374.84

• YieldMax AI & Tech ETF : $347.14

• Yieldmax AMZN Option ETF : $197.51

• Roundhill S&P 500 0DTE ETF : $194.45

• NEOS MLP Energy Infrastructure High Income ETF : $166.42

• YieldMax S&P 500 Option ETF : $122.53 (final payment, sold)

• Yieldmax NVDA Option ETF : $94.94

• ASML Holdings : $54.87

• NEOS Bitcoin High Income ETF : $42.53

• Mastercard : $27.50

• Victory Portfolios Free Cash Flow ETF : $2.93

• Cash sweep and other: $0.31

Dividend subtotal = $2,600.45

Covered Calls

Three contracts closed in August for $2,317.56 in profit, more than July’s $1,882.57 with fewer calls written. Most of it came from one trade: I sold three ASTS $75 calls on August 10 for $1,821.97 and bought them back eleven days later for $192.04 after the stock pulled back. That’s $1,629.93 on one contract, 70% of the month.

The MO trade is the one to copy if you’re new to this. I sold a $75 call expiring in March 2027 for $651.32 and closed it for $207.66 once the premium had come in. Long-dated calls pay the most up front, and when the stock dips you buy them back cheap, keep the difference and write again. The covered call guide walks through it step by step.

I opened a new ASTS $73 call on August 28 for $253.01. It’s still open, so it counts next month. Every contract is tracked in the Covered Call Dashboard for founding members.

Where The Capital Went

The buys were spread across the month rather than placed in one day, and I’m still adding to two of them, so the totals below are the August slice of a longer accumulation.

I typically buy these every Friday and will alert the group in subscriber chat.

The four sales freed $28,324 and August’s buys came to $23,384, so some of that capital is still staged for the next round, which is why the buy alerts keep coming.

got the most conviction money, and the case is the one I laid out in June’s buy alert and updated last week in the drone delivery piece: bookings growing 22%, free cash flow past $10 billion, and an autonomous and drone story the market is pricing at close to zero. I was buying at $79 in August and I’m still adding.

was the other big August buy, and I flagged it as a new position in the August 26 buy alert. It’s the same thesis as Uber from the other side of the road, a logistics network that gets more valuable with every merchant and every driver added, and it’s the one name in 3 Stocks Wall Street Keeps Underestimating that I said everyone already covers, which is why the entry price matters more than the story.

is the third growth name and the one I’m building slowest, because I already own a lot of the advertising story through META. I alerted Netflix alongside Bloom in December, and rotating BE’s gain partly into NFLX is the cleanest version of selling the position that ran and buying the one that hasn’t yet.

CGDV and VFLO are the two ETFs in the group and they’re there for a specific job. CGDV is already a top holding and every reinvested dividend and option premium I don’t need for a stock pick goes there, because it’s the most diversified way I’ve found to own MSFT, NVDA, AVGO and META with a manager who actually sells things. VFLO lives in my HSA, and if you missed why, the HSA piece covers it. Both pay small quarterly dividends, both grow them, and both are the kind of position I’ll never have to write a sell alert about.

Bottom Line

August paid $4,918.01, I sold four positions, my projected annual dividend income fell to $36,941, and I’d make every one of those decisions again this morning. Income is the output of this portfolio, and growth is how the output gets bigger. Anyone who’s been here since the HOOD buy alert in June has watched that play out in real dollars.

Thanks for reading. I post these reports every month, and I appreciate everyone sticking with me through a stretch where I've been selling income positions on purpose. If you find value in this newsletter, please consider gifting a subscription. For every gifted subscription I'll add an extra YEAR of free access to your account and upgrade you to the founding member tier for every future dashboard release.

So this article will be a part 2, which refines the strategy further! I’ve heard a lot of feedback about how income ETFs lack growth potential, so this article addresses that.

Here’s a forward looking projection of this updated portfolio of five funds, assuming the market rally continues. 5 position position that can triple in value if you reinvest dividends.

So this post does two things: it shows you exactly how each April position performed, fund by fund, and then it shows you the version I’d build if I were starting today.

👉 What you’ll get out of this

The April portfolio’s full report card, position by position. What I’d keep, what I’d cut, and why my own rotation toward growth changed the recipe. And the new five-position $50K build with exact weights, including what it pays from day one.

The April Report Card

Every position finished green, and one of them ran.

The April build was 30% Columbia Seligman Premium Tech , 40% NEOS S&P 500 High Income , and 30% Amplify International Enhanced Dividend .

Three funds with the goal of paying as much as possible, as reliably as possible, WHILE GROWING CAPITAL.

Here’s what $50,000 deployed on publication day looks like as of the August 28 close:

Okay let’s improve this now…

What I’d Build Differently Today

The April portfolio was built to maximize income, and that’s exactly what I’d change. This year I rotated my own money toward growth, sold the funds that paid the most but grew the least, and let covered call income replace some of what the high yielders used to pay me. Every monthly report since June has shown that shift working.

So the 2027 version fixes the ratio without shrinking the paycheck. It puts 55% to work in growth and rising dividends, then loads the other 45% into double-digit monthly payers, and the result is about $322 a month from day one, roughly 85% of what the April build paid, while more than half the portfolio now compounds. That’s the upgrade in one sentence: nearly the same income, and the growth engine April never had.

The New Allocation

Five positions, two jobs: 55% grows, 45% pays monthly. Here’s the full 2027 construction, with the two anchor positions named up front and the other three behind the paywall:

Nothing here carries a 40% yield, nothing uses leverage, and nothing needs babysitting, because a first portfolio's main job is to still exist in five years.

Position One: CGDV — 30%

The biggest slot goes to the fund that does both jobs at once. The Capital Group Dividend Value ETF is an actively managed fund holding 58 companies that pay dividends today and are built to keep raising them, and its largest positions are Microsoft, Nvidia, Broadcom, and Meta. That mix is exactly why it anchors this portfolio: you’re getting the companies driving the market’s growth, filtered through a manager who insists on getting paid along the way.

The yield is small, a little over 1%, and that’s fine.

This slot isn’t here for the income it pays in year one. It’s here for what a growing stream of dividends attached to appreciating companies turns into by year ten, and for the fact that it has beaten the plain S&P 500 while paying you quarterly. I own CGDV myself alongside my direct positions in Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft, and it’s the single fund I’d hand a beginner first.

Position Two: SCHD — 25%

The second slot is the raise machine. The Schwab US Dividend Equity ETF holds roughly 100 companies screened for a decade of consecutive payments, cash flow to cover the dividend, and a track record of growing it. It yields about 3% today, and the number that matters more is what it does to that payment over time: SCHD has raised its dividend at a high single digit rate for years, which means the income on this $12,500 roughly doubles every eight to nine years without you adding a dollar.

SCHD also fixes a problem most beginners don’t know they have. If your only holding is an S&P 500 fund, your retirement is riding on a handful of mega cap tech names, because that’s what the index has become. SCHD holds essentially none of them. Merck, Amgen, Abbott, Coca-Cola, Verizon.

These are boring companies that offer durable cash flows and almost zero overlap with the growth side of this portfolio.

Position one and position two should never have a bad year for the same reason.

📊 Positions three and four come from the same watchlist I maintain in The High Yield ETF Database, where I track every income fund I follow with the risk notes I actually use.

The next three positions are for paid subscribers

• The monthly payer running the same engine as one of the April funds on a richer index, and why that beats keeping the original

• The monthly payer built on the energy behind the AI buildout, which I alerted earlier this year and still buy today

• The pure growth fund that rebalances itself into whatever’s working, and why it beats stock picking for a beginner’s growth sleeve

• Why each of the three April funds lost its slot, including the one I still rate highly

• The full payout table: what all five positions pay on $50,000, position by position.

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The Ledger

You got a post roughly every other day, all year long. Here’s the full year from September 2025 through August 2026, broken out by what each piece was actually for:

The income reports are my favorite thing to publish. Every month you saw the actual dividends that hit my account, which funds paid them, what I added, what I cut, and why. When my income dropped because I rotated toward growth, I told you it dropped and I gave you a date for when I expected it to recover.

The Calls

All seven of my open buy alerts are up right now.

Every alert I send includes the ticker, my reasoning, and in most cases the exact price I paid. You can check my record against real dates instead of taking my word for it. I did exactly that back in December, when I reviewed all 17 buy alerts from 2025 against the S&P 500, position by position, in a post you can still read.

Here’s some of the most notable alerts.

The sells are part of the record too. In December I sold two high-yield option ETFs and wrote The Yield Trap to walk you through the NAV erosion math behind that exit.

In June I rotated out of some single-stock YieldMax funds completely and moved that capital into UBER, MSFT, META, and ASTS. Covered call income has been climbing ever since, and July was the best covered call month my portfolio has ever had.

Full transparency, nothing about the year was perfect. I also initiated buys on , , , and which hasn’t materialized into positive returns yet.

The Tools

I shipped four tools this year, and your subscription includes every one of them. If you’ve only been reading the posts, you’re honestly leaving half of your subscription on the table:

Paid subscribers also get the subscriber chat, and that’s where things show up first.

Rivian is a good example. I mentioned it in the chat before the buy alert ever published, so the people in there had the earliest look at a position that’s now up 24% from my entry. The same goes for my latest buy alerts on , , and . The chat is where I think out loud between posts, answer questions directly, and flag what I’m watching before it becomes an article. If you’ve never opened it, you’ve been getting the delayed version of this newsletter.

Founding members get the piece that literally pays for itself.

The Covered Call Dashboard is the exact tool I use to find the contracts behind my own covered call income, and founding members use it to do the same thing with their shares. You scan the chain, you skip the oversized premiums that are usually flagging risk, and you lock in your premium the moment you write the contract. That money is yours the day you sell the call, no matter what the market does after. July’s income report showed you what a month of that looks like in my own account. If you’re on the standard plan and you own 100 shares of anything, this dashboard alone is the reason to look at the founding tier.

What’s Coming In 2027

Nothing about my approach changes in 2027. AI and growth exposure carries the appreciation, covered calls and income funds pay the bills along the way, and the monthly reports will keep showing you the real numbers as it all happens.

The thesis I’ve been building across this year’s biggest pieces, the capex curve, the semiconductor buildout, and the power buildout behind AI, points at 2027 as the year free cash flow inflects for the companies I own. If that plays out, you’ll watch it happen position by position. And if it doesn’t, I’ll write about that too.

The publishing side keeps its cadence. You’ll keep getting weekly posts, an income report every month, and an alert with my reasoning every time a position changes. I also have new dashboard products on the drawing board, and anything that ships goes to subscribers first, the same way the Covered Call Dashboard went to founding members first.

If you aren’t a subscriber - here is a 25% off coupon code forever.

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Lock Your Rate

Your renewal keeps the price you pay today. If prices rise in 2027, that increase applies to new subscribers. Staying subscribed means the rate you signed up at is the rate you keep, for as long as your subscription stays active. Yearly renewals process automatically, so if your plan renews this fall, doing nothing keeps everything exactly as it is.

Thank you for a year of trust. Everyone reading this post funded the tools above and every hour of research behind those 171 posts, and I don’t take that lightly.

As always, just sharing my thoughts. See you in the September report.

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We are early to this, and that cuts both ways. Being early means you can accumulate a position before the crowd arrives and before the prices reflect what the technology eventually does.

Keyword is: Eventually.

The size of the Quantum Computing Market is estimated to grow to $8B by 2033, which represents a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 22.3% over the next few years.

Being early feels exactly like being wrong, and it feels that way for a long time. I have watched enough people quit on a good idea in year two to know that how you size a position like this matters more than whether you picked the right one.

I added a quantum position to the growth sleeve this week anyway.

👉Here are my latest buy alerts. Paid subs get every alert first in the subscriber chat.

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I collected $652 in dividends in last week of August and I rotated this capital into a specific fund. I also collected another $440 in option premiums this week that were reallocated to this Quantum ETF. The plan here is accumulating using dividends and covered call income, rather than using my own capital. The ETF has outperformed the S&P 500 since inception, just as a point of reference. This doesn’t guarantee that outperformance will continue, but it helps visualize the potential here.

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What Quantum Computing Actually Is

Let’s make this super easy to understand.

Think about a maze. Your laptop solves it by walking one path until it hits a wall, backing up, and trying the next one, over and over until something works.

A quantum computer walks every path at the same time and tells you which one led out. That is the difference and why these machines can crack problems in hours that would take a normal computer thousands of years.

The catch is that they only work on maze-shaped problems, so a quantum computer will never run your email or your spreadsheets. It’s still a very niche thing right now.

Here is what matters for us as investors. Nobody is going to buy one of these.

They are room-sized machines cooled to near absolute zero, and the customers are governments, banks, drug companies and chemical giants signing contracts worth tens of millions each. There is no consumer moment coming where sales suddenly explode the way phones or AI apps did. Revenue arrives in a small number of very large deals, which is exactly why this sector earned $1.9 billion last year despite being on every magazine cover, and why the timeline matters more here than the actual technology does.

Who Actually Makes Money From Quantum

Forecasts believe that quantum computing will create between $1.3 and $2.7 trillion of economic value by 2035. This means there is still huge upside potential, despite Quantum being locked behind specialty groups. This estimated value is estimated to be created across the following industries:

Probably not the breakdown you expected right? I also would’ve thought technology & semiconductors would be higher on that list.

Chemical companies designing materials, banks pricing risk, airlines routing fleets and drugmakers screening compounds all capture that value because they own the problems worth solving. Quantum will unlock the next wave of efficiency.

The companies building and selling quantum computers earned $1.9 billion in 2025. That is the entire vendor side of the industry against a $2.7 trillion headline, a gap of roughly 1,400 times.

So the technology can be exactly as transformative as promised and the companies selling it still keep a small slice of what it creates. Knowing that changed what I was willing to buy.

How To Get Exposure

I bought the Defiance Quantum ETF . It holds 89 positions on an equal-weight basis with a tilt toward hardware and infrastructure, charges 0.40%, and has been running since September 2018, so it has a real track record behind it. Like I established at the beginning of this, QTUM has massively outperformed the S&P 500.

I like QTUM because it also provides global exposure. U.S. exposure is only a little more than half of the fund, so if the U.S. indices retreat, QTUM may hold up better than something like QQQ.

In fact QTUM outperforms AND held up better during the downturn in 2022. Therefore, I think that QTUM is a suitable way for me to get exposure to the growth of Quantum stocks without taking on concentration risks to those small-cap companies.

Not only are you getting exposure to Quantum companies, you are getting access to companies across the different operating segments.

Palantir , Snowflake , Nutanix , and Microsoft make real money from businesses that have nothing to do with quantum.…yet. If quantum takes until 2032 instead of 2030, those holdings keep earning from their day jobs while the quantum piece develops.

Equal weighting means no single company can wreck the fund, which matters in a sector where roadmaps slip and companies run out of cash.

So here’s what I expect will happen over the next few years:

Between now and 2028, the sector goes from about $1.9 billion of revenue to maybe $4 billion, which is real growth and still a rounding error next to what these companies are valued at. Through 2030, progress shows up as technical milestones rather than earnings, so the stocks move on announcements instead of results.

The signal I am actually waiting for is commercial contracts replacing research grants. Right now most quantum revenue is governments and universities paying for experiments. When banks and chemical companies start buying outcomes because the machines solve problems their existing computers cannot, that is when this stops being a story.

Grand View Research sees vendor revenue near $8 billion by 2033, growing 22.3% a year. Cut that estimate in half and you still have double digit annual expansion, nine years out.

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Three Ways I End Up Wrong

The timeline slips from 2030 to 2035. Every roadmap in this sector has moved at least once and there is no reason to assume this one will not. If the tipping point keeps sliding, I hold a position that goes nowhere for years while other things run. I think that is the most likely outcome, and it is why the position stays small.

The adjacent holdings cut both ways. What I like about this fund is that Microsoft, Palantir and Snowflake give it a floor. That also means a chunk of what I own is ordinary tech exposure I probably already have elsewhere, so I am paying 0.40% for a mix that is less quantum than the name suggests.

The government changes its mind. Much of what makes this sector fundable is federal money, and federal priorities move with administrations and budgets. Equity stakes are stickier than grants and they are not permanent. If the CHIPS money slows, companies burning cash today have a much harder time raising more.

The Bottom Line

The $2.7 trillion headline describes value flowing to the industries that use quantum computing, while the companies selling it earned $1.9 billion last year. The gap between those two numbers is why I did not buy the pure plays, several of which are down this year despite triple digit revenue growth.

So I bought the diversified fund instead. 89 holdings, a largest position of 2.28%, and a portfolio where Microsoft and Snowflake pay the bills while the quantum piece develops. It is a satellite position funded by income from elsewhere, and I will add on weakness over the next few years rather than all at once.

None of this is a recommendation and my situation is not yours. This sector has almost no revenue, no profits, and a timeline that has slipped before. Early is not the same as right, and I am taking that risk on purpose and in small size.

I will update you as this develops. The thing I am watching is whether commercial contracts start replacing research grants, which is when this stops being a story.

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Here are some of my prior buy alerts and their respective performances:

1. Robinhood : up 34% since the buy alert was posted 3 months ago.

2. Rivian (RIVN): up ~18% since originally mentioned in subscriber chat.

3. Uber Technology : up more than 12% since initial buy alert.

4. Bloom Energy : up 142% since the initial buy alert.

5. ASML Holding : 128% gain from the original buy alert.

You may have noticed that I stopped publishing articles on some of the high yield funds I originally posted about. I still hold these shares but dividends and contributions are becoming a smaller part of the growth within my portfolio.

I aim to invest at least $3k a month but the growing portfolio size means that new capital isn’t as meaningful as it once was. Therefore, my growth is becoming more dependent on the QUALITY of the positions I hold. Therefore, I am adjusting accordingly.

With that being said, I am manually reinvesting dividends and option premiums into these growth positions. So I am able to implement a dividend wheel strategy here that keeps wealth compounding over time effortless.

Let’s dive into the first new position..

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Check out some of my recent analysis articles.

Stock #1

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I bought Uber in the low $70s and told you it was a $100 stock inside twelve months. Since then the company has reported its best quarter as a public company, announced a $14.8 billion acquisition, and signed a partnership aimed at a million drone deliveries a day.

Since that last coverage, has seen its fair share of volatility but is trending higher than the S&P 500 .

When the price does nothing and the business gets better, the position gets more attractive. Therefore, I wanted to check whether the thesis actually improved or whether I am just telling myself it did. So far, it seems like UBER remains a compelling opportunity for investors that want to accumulate a high quality company at a discount.

Here is what changed since I bought, what I got wrong in my last write-up, and the new leg of the story that I think matters more than the robotaxi debate everyone is still having. I have achieved a $10,000 position and am working my way towards $20,000.

👉 One of my Buy Alerts are up more than 15%. Paid members get every alert as I place it.

Earnings Report Confirms Strength

Uber reported Q2 on August 5, and the number that matters most is gross bookings at $58.0 billion, up 22% and above the high end of the company’s own guidance. That is the fourth consecutive quarter above 20% growth. A business supposedly being disrupted into the ground is accelerating. Fundamentally, UBER is seeing more volume, higher margins, and expanding its recurring revenue from subscription revenue.

Look at where the growth came from. Delivery grew 25% and Freight grew 25%, both faster than Mobility at 20%. That matters for the bear case, because Delivery is the segment robotaxis do not touch, and it is now growing faster than the segment they supposedly threaten.

Trips rose 18% to 3.87 billion and monthly users rose 16% to 208 million, so the volume is coming from more people using the platform rather than from raising prices.

Its segment operating income crossed $1 billion in a quarter for the first time, landing at $1.055 billion, up 38% year over year. Its margin on bookings has gone up every single quarter for five quarters running, from 3.5% to 3.8%. Mobility is still the bigger profit pool at $2.215 billion and a 7.6% margin, and Delivery is the one improving faster. Freight, the segment nobody talks about, went from shrinking to growing 25% in constant currency, though it still lost $24 million.

Start with the merchant funded offers, up about 70%. Those are discounts the restaurants pay for rather than discounts Uber pays for. Uber gets the volume, the customer gets the deal, and somebody else absorbs the cost. That is the cleanest explanation I can give you for why Delivery margin has now risen five quarters in a row. The company is running bigger promotions and spending less of its own money doing it, which is what pricing power looks like when a platform gets large enough that merchants compete to be on it.

Then look at non-UberX trips, up about 110%. That is people trading up to Uber Black, Comfort and the premium tiers rather than taking the cheapest ride. Higher-priced trips at the same take rate mean more bookings and more profit per trip, and it is happening because membership perks make the upgrade feel free. There are also more than 400,000 participating merchants now, up about 50%, and 35-plus outside partners including Delta, Marriott, Disney+, PayPal and Qantas, most of whom fund their own perks in exchange for access to Uber's users.

Then there is the one I care about most as an income investor at heart. Trailing twelve-month free cash flow reached $10.1 billion, the first time it has crossed ten figures in company history. The five-quarter path is $8.5 billion, $8.7 billion, $9.8 billion, $9.8 billion, $10.1 billion, so this is a trend rather than one good quarter. Uber generated $2.8 billion of it in the quarter alone against a market cap that has not moved, which works out to roughly a 6.6% free cash flow yield on a business compounding bookings north of 20%.

The Trap I Warned You About, Running In Reverse

In my last write-up I told you to ignore Uber’s GAAP net income because it had absorbed a $1.5 billion non-cash markdown on the company’s equity investments. The headline looked like a collapse and the operating business underneath was fine. That was the right call and the stock has since proven it.

This quarter GAAP diluted EPS came in at $1.17 against $0.63 a year ago, and GAAP net income rose 77%, which looks spectacular on the headline. It also includes a $1.6 billion pre-tax benefit from revaluing those same equity investments.

If I told you to look through it when it made the numbers ugly, I have to tell you to look through it now that it makes them beautiful. The honest read on this quarter is the non-GAAP figure of $0.81, up 35%, and that number is strong enough that nobody needs the accounting help.

Put the last five quarters side by side and the point makes itself.

I am flagging this because it is exactly the kind of thing that gets quoted back at you in six months. If the stock re-rates and someone tells you GAAP earnings nearly doubled, you will know that a chunk of that was a mark-to-market entry on private company stakes rather than money Uber earned moving people and food around.

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The Drone Leg Nobody Is Paying For

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I believe that 2027 will be an incredible strong year for stocks and here’s how to position yourself.

I’ve spent most of this year writing about the same thing from four different angles: the capital spending cycle in technology, the semiconductor buildout underneath it, the electricity needed to run it, and the momentum money that follows all three. Those were four separate articles making one argument.

I’m bullish on big tech through 2027, and this month I put $5,000 into a fund that pays about 11% a year on the exact companies driving that argument. I’ll be building the position over time.

👉 What you'll get out of this:

The four legs of my bull case with the numbers behind each. Why being bullish should change which income funds you buy. And the fund I opened a position in, with what would make me stop adding.

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Check out my prior buy alert, which is now up roughly 9% since that article was published.

Why I’m Bullish

Hyperscaler capital spending growth peaked near 91% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, and consensus has it decelerating toward single digits by the end of 2027. Decelerating growth is very different from declining spend, since the absolute dollars stay at record levels while the rate of increase flattens, and that flattening is where free cash flow starts expanding again.

As we can see below, Goldman Sachs estimates that capex spending will likely slow through 2027. Once that happens, I think confidence will be restored in the mega-cap leaders like , , , .

The semiconductor spending behind this cycle runs to roughly $1.3 trillion, and fabs, packaging capacity and equipment orders get placed years ahead of the revenue they serve. That money is already moving whether sentiment improves next quarter or not. So I anticipate semiconductors will likely remains healthy over the next 48 months as well.

Moving on, the power demand is contracted.

The International Energy Agency puts data center electricity around 415 terawatt hours in 2024, rising to roughly 945 by 2030 in its base case, and Morgan Stanley puts US demand near 74 gigawatts by 2028 against a shortfall of about 49. Nobody builds that unless the compute demand behind it is already booked, and I’ve been trading the energy side of this story since the spring.

The rally is broadening.

The ten largest companies made up 37.6% of the S&P 500 as of August 14, down from a record 41.2% earlier this year, and equal weight is beating cap weight in 2026. A market that widens while the leaders keep spending is healthier than one carried by ten names.

How To Get Paid Monthly Cash Flow From Tech

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However, investing responsibly does not mean you have to surrender your dividend income. You can build a portfolio that reflects your values and still pays you. Today, we are looking at three ESG funds that provide sustainable exposure while still yielding a reliable return.

HOWEVER, you must understand that funds with specific ESG requirements will generally underperform the S&P 500 and other technology indices.

Interestingly, I was able to find 3 funds that outperformed the S&P 500 on a YTD basis. While I don’t expect this outperformance to continue, it’s nice to know that they can offer attractive returns over time while still paying a dividend.

These funds all pay a dividend and provide direct exposure to some of the strongest blue chip companies in the world. So although you may be giving up exposure to technology companies, you are still fitting within the theme of collecting income from your invested capital.

Before we jump into the data, if you are just getting your portfolio off the ground, make sure to read my recent guide on Start Investing With $1,000 or review Dividend Investing for Beginners to get your snowball rolling.

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If you own energy for the dividend and your payout is large because the Strait of Hormuz is congested, one diplomatic breakthrough can shrink it. Therefore, I think we can position ourselves into the funds that thrive regardless of the price of oil.

A second demand story is building underneath the first one, and it runs on electricity instead of barrels. The market is still trading the headline about the strait, so this one is not priced in yet. The companies that collect from it get paid whether crude sits at $90 or $60, on contracts running ten and twenty years. The key here is that there are a bulk of companies that get paid on volume of contracted activity, which insulates them from the actual price of oil.

I’ll highlight 3-funds that offer a high yield:

1. Stock #1: 7.4% dividend yield.

2. Stock #2: 7.3% dividend yield.

3. Stock #3: 6.3% dividend yield.

For instance, the second fund in this list pays a 7.3% dividend yield, while getting exposure to the toll booth companies. This fund has crushed the S&P 500 in total returns over the last three years. I believe this outperformance is likely to continue. Who says you can’t collect income AND outperform?

Below are the three ways an energy company gets paid, and one income fund for each of the two that do not care what a barrel costs.

The Breakdown Of Energy: 3-Levels

Every energy company gets paid in one of three ways. Which one decides whether your dividend survives a lower oil price. I think the below table is the easiest way to get an understanding of the dynamics here. I think it’s best to only maintain long exposure to businesses in the second and third categories.

Say crude falls from $90 to $65 over the next eighteen months. The producer loses revenue that day, because the price is part of its formula.

However, the pipeline companies collect the same fee per unit as long as the gas keeps moving through, which makes these companies a bit more insulated against price fluctuations. Lastly, the utility never feels it, because its return is set on what it has built, not on what fuel costs.

Now run it the other way. Say electricity demand climbs hard for five years. The producer only wins if that demand lifts the price. The pipeline wins directly, because more electricity means more gas through the same steel. The utility wins most, because serving new demand means building, and building is what it earns its return on.

One tier needs you to be right about a price. The other two need you to be right about demand, and electricity demand is much easier to see coming than the price of a barrel a year from now.

The Demand Nobody Has To Guess About

Data centers used about 415 terawatt hours of electricity worldwide in 2024. The International Energy Agency expects that to reach roughly 945 by 2030, so it more than doubles. That figure comes from counting buildings that are already funded, already permitted, and in many cases already under construction.

The US picture is tighter. Morgan Stanley puts domestic data center demand near 74 gigawatts by 2028, against a shortfall of about 49 gigawatts in power that can actually be delivered. A shortfall means the power does not exist yet and someone has to build it. The fastest thing to build is a gas plant. Solar and wind need land and new transmission lines. Nuclear takes a decade. Gas turbines take about two years.

Every one of those plants needs gas delivered by pipeline, without pause, forever. Every one connects to a grid that a utility has to upgrade to handle it. Both of those jobs get paid a set fee for volume delivered, and neither one asks what a barrel of crude costs. It is the same reasoning behind the AI-resistant dividend stocks I have covered before, applied to the power side instead of the software side.

The length of those contracts is why this is an income story and not a trade. Pipeline and utility agreements run ten and twenty years. A distribution paid out of one of those has years of visibility behind it, which a distribution paid out of a price spike does not. The risk here is not that the demand fails to show up. It is that the building takes longer than planned, which delays the growth without cancelling it.

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Stock #1: AMLP: 61 Quarters Without Missing

The Alerian MLP ETF owns the largest pipeline partnerships in the country and pays 7.45% at a recent price of $55.32. It has made 61 quarterly payments in a row since August 2010, a run that covers both the 2014 crude collapse and the 2020 shutdown. A fund paid on commodity prices does not get through those two events without missing.

Two things about how it is built matter more than the yield. It borrows nothing, so the payout comes from cash the partnerships actually earn rather than from debt stretching a smaller amount further. And it is set up as a corporation, so you get a 1099 in February instead of the K-1 that scares most people away from pipelines entirely. Only about 3.29% of the last year of payments was return of capital, so nearly all of it is real income.

Returns held up without crude cooperating. Through June the fund fact sheet shows 14.90% over one year and 18.83% a year over three. Look at the ten-year number too, 6.39%, which is far lower because it includes the 2015 and 2020 wipeouts. Pipelines spent years being written off, and the ones that made it through kept collecting fees the whole time.

Thirteen to fifteen holdings, with the top ten above 95% of the fund, is a bet on a handful of large pipeline operators, and that is what you are paying for the yield with. It works as long as their contracts hold, and it means this belongs in your portfolio as a sector position rather than as something you build around.

Two more stocks now….

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I never wanted to feel like I was begging an insurance company for coverage. Whether a treatment happens should not depend on whether an adjuster approves it, and the only way I know to remove that dependence is to show up at 65 with a dedicated pile of money that answers to nobody.

So I am building that pile now, inside my HSA (Health Savings Account), with a dividend ETF. The account gives me three tax breaks on the same dollars, the fund raises its payment nearly every year, and every distribution buys more shares. This article walks through the account, the fund, what it holds, and what $3,000 a year turns into over 25 years when nothing gets spent along the way.

This will be the second fund within my HSA, focused around total return and income growth.

Open A Health Savings Account ASAP

A health savings account is the only account in the tax code with three separate breaks on the same money. It’s the only account that allows you to grow your capital without any TAXES paid.

1. Contributions go in before tax.

2. Growth inside the account is never taxed.

3. Withdrawals for qualified medical costs come out untaxed too.

A 401k gives you the first two and taxes you on the way out. A Roth taxes you on the way in. The HSA skips all three, and for 2026 an individual can put in up to $4,400, so my $3,000 fits with room to spare.

Every dollar inside gets invested and stays invested. By buying a fund that produces me dividends, I can pay for healthcare expenses with DIVIDENDS, rather than capital I contributed or capital gains, which would force me to sell investments.

One feature makes this even better, and almost nobody knows it. There is no deadline on HSA reimbursements. If I pay a $500 medical bill in cash today and keep the receipt, I can reimburse myself from the account in 2049, tax free, after that $500 spent twenty years compounding. The receipts folder is effectively a stack of future tax-free withdrawals that grow until I want them.

The Specific Fund I Am Using

The fund I use charges 0.05% a year, which rounds to nothing. It holds 385 companies, so no single business failing can hurt the plan. Its dividend has grown about 15% a year over the past five years, and it has paid for eight straight years without interruption. Its starting yield sits near 2%, which looks small next to the double-digit payers I write about elsewhere, and for this specific job the small yield with fast growth beats the big yield with none.

Looking at the table below, this fund has been able to provide an average annual dividend raise of 15.19% per year, for the last FIVE years. Does your job give you a 15% raise every year?

The selection methodology is what separates this fund from the dividend funds everyone already owns. Most dividend indexes rank companies by yield or by years of consecutive raises. This one ranks them by the total dollars a company returns to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks combined, then applies quality screens to both. That single design choice pulls in a different set of companies than the usual suspects, and it is the reason the fund looks the way it does inside.

It has also outrun the market while doing it. Over the past year it returned 37.3% with every dividend reinvested, against 22% for the S&P 500 . Since 2018 it has compounded at roughly 15% a year and finished ahead of the three most popular dividend ETFs in the country over that stretch. Past results guarantee nothing about the next 25 years, and a record like that is still the right starting point for a fund being asked to carry a healthcare bill.

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The fund I am talking about is the…

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