Before there was QQQI, there was QYLD, and the story of Bryan Perry’s current pitch cannot be told without the fund he recommended first. QYLD is the Global X Nasdaq-100 Covered Call ETF (QYLD), and in October 2019 Perry told his readers it “paid a hefty annual yield of 11.14% in regular monthly installments.” He was right about the yield. What happened to the fund after that recommendation is the reason he now pitches something else, and it is also the clearest warning label for the entire category.

The Fund That Started It

QYLD is the archetype of the covered call ETF. It owns the Nasdaq-100 and sells at-the-money calls against it on a fixed monthly schedule, collecting the maximum premium and paying most of it out. The approach is mechanical and predictable, which was exactly its appeal: an income investor could count on a monthly check without thinking about strikes or expirations.

The cost of that predictability is the upside. Because the calls are sold at the current price, the fund hands away its gains from the very first tick higher each month. In a strong bull market, QYLD collects its premium and watches the index run away from it. That is the trade Perry recommended in 2019, and for an income-focused reader it was a defensible one. The problem is what the total return looked like over time.

The Math Perry Does Not Show

Since that October 2019 recommendation, QYLD has delivered roughly 65% in total return, while the Nasdaq-100 it holds returned something on the order of 230%. The gap is the upside the fund sold away, month after month, for six years. An investor who understood the trade and wanted the cash got exactly what they signed up for. An investor who expected to keep up with the market did not.

The drawdown math is just as instructive. In the 2022 selloff, the Nasdaq-100 fell about 35% peak to trough, while QYLD fell about 29%, a modest cushion. But an investor who bought at Perry’s October 2019 recommendation and sold at the 2022 bottom had about 45% in the index versus about 4.5% in QYLD. The fund kept almost all of the downside and gave away almost all of the upside, which is the structural reality of the at-the-money, fixed-schedule approach.

Why Perry Dropped It

Perry’s move to QQQI, the NEOS Nasdaq-100 High Income ETF (QQQI), is the most credible part of his current pitch. QQQI runs an active strategy rather than a mechanical one, using call spreads and judgment about strikes and expirations to collect meaningful income while keeping more upside. The result has been a meaningfully better total return than QYLD since QQQI launched in January 2024, and in some down months QQQI has nearly kept pace with the index. Swapping a passive, upside-capping fund for a better-managed one is exactly what a diligent income analyst should do, and Perry deserves credit for doing it.

There is a wrinkle the pitch skips. Over the specific trailing twelve months our teardown reviewed, QYLD actually outperformed QQQI, returning about 16.7% versus QQQI’s 9.3%. That single window does not overturn the longer trend, but it does undermine the pitch’s flat claim that QQQI is strictly better. The comparison flips depending on when you start the clock, which is precisely why our QYLD vs QQQI breakdown walks through both windows.

The Honest Read

QYLD is not a bad fund; it is a fund with a specific, now-outdated design, and it still does what it was built to do, pay a high monthly distribution. Its lesson is the one every covered call investor should internalize: the yield is real, but it is funded by the upside you give away, and over a full cycle the total return can trail the index by a wide margin. Perry’s move to a better-managed fund is the right call, even if the pitch’s “safe” framing around it is not. For the mechanics of the category as a whole, see our covered call ETF explainer.

The 2019 Recommendation in Context

It is worth reconstructing what the income market looked like when Bryan Perry recommended QYLD in October 2019, because the context makes the call look more sensible than the hindsight does. The Federal Reserve had spent the previous decade holding rates near zero, the yield on the ten-year Treasury sat under 2%, and a saver could not find a CD paying 3%. In that environment, a fund promising an 11% yield looked like a lifeline, and for an income investor starved of options, it partly was.

That is the honest defense of the 2019 call. Perry was responding to a genuine problem, and the fund did deliver the income it promised. What the hindsight reveals is the cost that the yield hid, the 230% index return the fund mostly missed over the following years. The lesson is not that Perry was wrong to recommend an income product; it is that a high yield in a zero-rate world is the market’s way of selling you risk you might not have priced. The context explains the call; it does not erase the math.

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