QQQI is the ticker for the NEOS Nasdaq-100 High Income ETF, and it is the fund sitting at the center of a promotion that has run, with only the dates changed, since late 2024. The pitch calls it a “safe 14.1% income fund,” and that headline number is built to stop a scroll. Before you click through, you should understand exactly what QQQI is, where the 14.1% comes from, and what the fund gives up to produce it.

What QQQI Is

QQQI launched on January 29, 2024, from NEOS Investments, and it carries a 0.68% expense ratio, high for a plain index fund but ordinary for an actively managed covered-call product. The fund’s job is simple to describe and harder to live with. It owns exposure to the Nasdaq-100 index, then sells call options against that position to collect premium, which it passes to shareholders as a monthly distribution. What shareholders give up in return is most of the upside. If the index rips higher, the calls are exercised and the fund misses the gain beyond the strike price. What shareholders keep is all of the downside. In a rough month where the Nasdaq-100 falls 20%, QQQI falls roughly 20% too.

That last point is the part the word “safe” skates over. A covered-call fund has no principal protection, no maturity date, and no guarantee. It is an equity fund with an income overlay, not a bond substitute. The promotion leans on this confusion by placing QQQI beside a certificate of deposit as if the two were two rungs on the same ladder.

Where the 14.1% Yield Comes From

The headline yield is a distribution yield, not a return. QQQI pays out a slice of the option premium it collects each month, and in a strong market those premiums are generous, which is why the advertised figure sits in the mid-teens. But a fund can pay a 14% distribution while the value of your shares quietly erodes, because part of every check is effectively the premium collected during a bull market, and over time some of it can represent a return of your own capital.

A certificate of deposit paying 4.5% guarantees your money back; QQQI guarantees nothing of the sort. The two instruments sit on different shelves, and the promotion’s habit of placing them side by side as “triple the yield” is the most important thing to understand before you buy. We walk through the yield mechanics in our equity premium income explainer.

The Numbers Behind the Pitch

The promotion stacks three figures. The first is the payout hook: a high-net-worth reader who puts $1 million in is promised a “$11,250 payout in less than 30 days.” That is a 1.125% monthly distribution, roughly 13.5% annualized, and as a payout figure it checks out. The second is the “whopping 14.1% yield,” presented as triple a typical CD. The third, and the one that deserves the most scrutiny, is the claim that “over the past 12 months, the share price of this fund has grown 19.88%, including dividends.”

That third number is stale. Our teardown ran QQQI’s actual trailing twelve-month total return and came up with about 9.3%, not 19.88%. The share price fell over that stretch, and the monthly distributions made up the difference. Even more telling is the comparison: over the same twelve months, the Nasdaq-100 index returned about 12.6%, and the older covered-call fund Bryan Perry used to recommend did better than QQQI at 16.7%.

QQQI vs the Field

QQQI is a genuine upgrade over the fund Perry recommended back in October 2019, the Global X Nasdaq-100 Covered Call ETF. That older fund mechanically sells at-the-money calls every month on a fixed schedule, while QQQI’s managers run a more active strategy that sometimes uses call spreads and more complex structures. The result is a meaningfully better total return since launch, and in some down months it has nearly kept pace with the index. The fund won etf.com’s “best new active ETF” award in 2024. We laid out the full scoreboard in our head-to-head comparison of the two.

There is also a quieter alternative worth naming. ProShares runs a Nasdaq-100 income fund that sells single-day options rather than month-out calls, which yields less, around 6%, but gives away less of each month’s upside. That trade is covered in our daily options explainer.

The Honest Bottom Line

QQQI is a well-run covered-call fund, and Perry is doing his readers a real service by pointing them toward a better product than the one he recommended five years ago. But it is an income trade, not a “safe” bond substitute. If you want current income and accept that your total return will almost certainly trail the Nasdaq-100 over a full cycle, QQQI is a defensible holding. If you want safety, buy the CD; if you want wealth-building, buy the index. Just do not mistake the first for the other two. For the full picture of what Perry is actually selling and how the “safe” label holds up against the fine print, see our complete Cash Machine review.

And ignore the ex-dividend countdown that frames the offer. The fund pays every single month, so there is no meaningful cost to waiting. The first year runs $77 with a 30-day refund, which is modest for a newsletter. For the broader mechanics, see our covered call ETF explainer, and for the income shelf this fund sits on, our monthly dividend stocks coverage.

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