August paid $4,918.01 in combined dividend and covered call income, the best month I’ve reported.
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 HOOD 0.00%↑.
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.
Sell Alert: 4 Positions Out
I sold four positions in August:
YieldMax S&P 500 0DTE Covered Call Strategy ETF SDTY 0.00%↑
Kroger KR 0.00%↑
YieldMax Universe Fund of Option Income ETFs YMAX 0.00%↑
Bloom Energy BE 0.00%↑.
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 QDTY 0.00%↑: $512.54
Yieldmax MSFT Option ETF MSFO 0.00%↑: $461.94
Cornerstone Strategic Investment Fund CLM 0.00%↑: $374.84
YieldMax AI & Tech ETF GPTY 0.00%↑: $347.14
Yieldmax AMZN Option ETF AMZY 0.00%↑: $197.51
Roundhill S&P 500 0DTE ETF XDTE 0.00%↑: $194.45
NEOS MLP Energy Infrastructure High Income ETF MLPI 0.00%↑: $166.42
YieldMax S&P 500 Option ETF SDTY 0.00%↑: $122.53 (final payment, sold)
Yieldmax NVDA Option ETF NVDY 0.00%↑: $94.94
ASML Holdings ASML 0.00%↑: $54.87
NEOS Bitcoin High Income ETF BTCI 0.00%↑: $42.53
Mastercard MA 0.00%↑: $27.50
Victory Portfolios Free Cash Flow ETF VFLO 0.00%↑: $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.
UBER 0.00%↑ 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.
DASH 0.00%↑ 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.
NFLX 0.00%↑ 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.