Cash Machine Review: Is Bryan Perry’s “Safe 14.1% Income Fund” Worth It?

The email opens with a countdown clock, and that is the first thing to notice. “Getting in during the next 48 hours enables shareholders to catch the next payout for owning it less than 30 days,” writes Bryan Perry, editor of the Cash Machine advisory. The headline number is built to stop a scroll: a 14.1% yield, framed as “safe” enough to replace a CD. What the promotion does not lead with is the part that actually matters for your decision, which is that the fund behind the tease is not a bond, not a money-market fund, and not remotely a certificate of deposit. It is a covered-call exchange-traded fund that holds the Nasdaq-100 and sells call options against it to manufacture a high monthly distribution.

There is no secret to crack here. Stock Gumshoe already named the fund outright, and so do we: it is the NEOS Nasdaq-100 High Income ETF, ticker QQQI. The interesting question in a review like this is not what the fund is. It is whether the word “safe” survives contact with how a covered-call fund actually behaves, and whether a retiree shopping for CD replacement income is getting what the pitch implies. We took the presentation apart, checked the yield math, and read the fine print on the offer. Here is what we found.

The Presenter

Bryan Perry edits Cash Machine, an income-focused advisory aimed squarely at investors who want a monthly check rather than a growth story. The promotion does not spend much time burnishing a personal Wall Street resume the way some pitches do; its credibility argument rests instead on a dated, checkable prior call. In October 2019, Perry recommended the Global X Nasdaq-100 Covered Call ETF, ticker QYLD, and the presentation tells readers it “paid a hefty annual yield of 11.14% in regular monthly installments.” He is now telling those same readers he has found something better.

That is the right way to read Perry’s approach. He is not pitching a moonshot or a “once in a lifetime” sector call. He is doing the unglamorous, genuinely useful work of a dividend newsletter: keeping an eye on the income-products shelf, and when a better-run fund appears, flagging it for the people who depend on those payouts. Income investors are a real audience with a real problem. The four percent-and-change a CD pays does not keep up with a household’s cost of living, and retirees who need current cash are constantly weighing higher yields against the risk of touching principal. Perry is speaking directly to that tension, and he is doing it with a concrete product rather than a vague “secret income stream.”

His earlier QYLD call deserves an honest accounting, because it is the spine of his credibility and it cuts both ways. QYLD was a legitimate income pick in 2019, and an investor who reinvested dividends from then has collected meaningful cash. But the total-return story is the one the promo does not show: since that October 2019 recommendation, QYLD has delivered roughly 65% total return while the plain Nasdaq-100 it derives from returned something on the order of 230%. An income investor who understood that trade and wanted the cash got exactly what they signed up for. The point is simply that Perry’s track record is a track record in the income trade, not in beating the index, and the difference matters for how you read everything else in the pitch.

The Big Idea

The mechanism Perry is selling is a covered-call fund, and it is worth understanding clearly because the entire pitch hangs on it. A covered-call fund owns a basket of stocks, in this case the Nasdaq-100, and then sells call options against that position. The option buyer pays a premium for the right to buy the shares at a fixed strike price; the fund keeps that premium and passes most of it to shareholders as a monthly distribution. In exchange for that income, the fund gives away most of its upside. If the index rips higher, the calls get exercised and the fund misses the gain beyond the strike. What the fund does not give away is the downside: if the Nasdaq-100 drops 20% in a rough month, the fund drops roughly 20% too, and the monthly check only cushions a point or so of that fall.

This is the entire “safe 14.1%” claim, and it is where the framing does the heavy lifting. The 14.1% is a distribution yield, not a return. A fund can pay you 14% while the value of your shares quietly erodes, because a slice of every payout is effectively the option premium collected during a bull market and, over time, a portion can represent a return of your own capital. A CD, by contrast, guarantees your principal back. Those two instruments sit on different risk shelves entirely, and the promotion’s habit of placing them side by side as “triple the yield of a typical CD paying 4.5%” is the single most important thing to understand before you click through.

There is also a quieter, genuinely interesting argument inside the pitch that deserves credit. Perry’s specific fund choice is not random. QQQI runs a more active covered-call strategy than QYLD’s mechanical sell-at-the-money-every-month approach, sometimes using call spreads and more complex structures, and the results show it: QQQI has posted a meaningfully better total return than QYLD since it launched in January 2024, 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. So the upgrade Perry is recommending is real, even if the “safe” packaging around it is not.

The Key Claims

The presentation stacks three specific numbers, and each one is worth pinning down in the promo’s own words.

The first is the payout hook: “my high net-worth readers who put $1 million in this fund today could potentially grab a $11,250 payout in less than 30 days.” Do the math and a $11,250 monthly payout on $1 million is a 1.125% monthly distribution, which annualizes to roughly 13.5%. That checks out against the advertised yield. What the sentence does not say is that this is a distribution, not a return, and that the same $1 million could just as easily be worth $900,000 thirty days later if the Nasdaq-100 has a bad month.

The second is the headline itself: a “whopping 14.1% yield,” three times what a CD pays. The direction is accurate. QQQI does currently distribute in the mid-teens, and for an income-focused investor that cash flow is real and genuinely attractive. The error is the word “safe” and the CD comparison. There is no principal protection in a covered-call fund, full stop.

The third is the one that does not hold up: “over the past 12 months, the share price of this fund has grown 19.88%, including dividends.” Stock Gumshoe ran the actual trailing twelve-month total return and got about 9.3%, not 19.88%. The share price fell over that stretch, and the monthly distributions made up the difference. Even more instructive is the comparison set the promo itself invites: over that same twelve months, the underlying Nasdaq-100 returned about 12.6%, and QYLD, the older fund Perry says he no longer recommends, actually did better than QQQI at about 16.7%. The “even better than QYLD” claim happens to be false for this specific trailing window.

There is also a clue designed to signal safety that dissolves on inspection. The promotion leans on the fact that “one big institutional investor owns 1,021,337 shares” and that firms like LPL Financial, Capital Investment Advisory Services, Cascade Wealth Advisors, and Susquehanna International Group are piling in. That is true, and it tells you almost nothing about future returns. Wealth managers and advisory shops park client money in high-yield funds precisely because their clients are asking for current income. The presence of those holders is a comment on demand for income, not a vote that the fund is uniquely safe.

The Free Ticker

The free pick is not a tease; it is named outright. It is the NEOS Nasdaq-100 High Income ETF, ticker QQQI.

Perry’s case for it is straightforward and mostly honest. Compared with QYLD, the fund he recommended in October 2019, QQQI’s active managers have narrowed the structural gap against the index. The fund launched on January 29, 2024, carries a 0.68% expense ratio, which is unremarkable for an actively managed covered-call product, and it pays a monthly distribution that currently annualizes in the mid-teens. On a pure income basis, this is a defensible holding for someone who wants a monthly check and accepts that their total return will almost certainly trail the Nasdaq-100 over a full market cycle.

There is one alternative the presentation never mentions, and it belongs in any fair review. The ProShares Nasdaq 100 High Income ETF, ticker IQQQ, sells single-day, zero-days-to-expiration options rather than month-out calls. It currently yields around 6% instead of 14%, but it gives away less of the monthly upside, and it has so far roughly matched QQQI’s total return with less share-price erosion. For an investor who wants some index exposure alongside income, IQQQ is a reasonable alternative that is simply absent from Perry’s comparison. That omission is not disqualifying, but it is the difference between a full picture and a curated one.

The pricing detail worth a final note: QQQI has been teased both above and below its current price as the fund drifts with the Nasdaq-100. The latest re-recommendation named it at $51.31, essentially the then-current price, so this is not a “get in before it runs” setup. It is a fund trading roughly flat, paying monthly, and re-advertised every month with a refreshed deadline.

What You Get

The product is the Cash Machine advisory itself, and the offer is modest by newsletter standards. A first-year subscription runs $77, with a 30-day refund period. The promotion does not disclose the renewal rate up front, which is worth flagging but is also common across this entire category of newsletter. At that price, the pitch is cheap compared with the four-figure “elite tier” upsells many promos lead with, and the refund window gives you a real, low-cost way to look at the model portfolio and the monthly income commentary before committing.

What you are actually buying is the ongoing service: monthly issues from Perry, access to the model portfolio, and the newsletter’s running coverage of income products, which is where the value sits. The reason to subscribe is not the single QQQI call, which you can now evaluate for yourself with the ticker in hand. It is the ongoing work of someone monitoring the income shelf and flagging when a better fund appears, the same way he moved from QYLD to QQQI. That is a genuinely useful service for a retiree who does not want to read options prospectuses for a living.

Our Take

The honest summary is that QQQI is a fine covered-call fund, and Bryan Perry is doing his readers a service by pointing them toward a better-run product than the one he recommended before. The fund is legitimate, the income is real, and the upgrade over QYLD is genuine. For a retiree who wants current cash and understands the trade, this is a defensible holding.

The problem is entirely in the packaging, and it matters more for this audience than for most. Calling a covered-call fund “safe” and setting it beside a CD is a category error with real consequences. A CD is for money you cannot afford to lose; a covered-call fund is for money you can. The “14.1% safe yield” framing invites readers to substitute the first for the second, and the fine print does not correct the impression nearly as loudly as the headline creates it. The “19.88% over 12 months” claim is stale and wrong, and the ex-dividend countdown is manufactured urgency: QQQI pays every single month, so there is no meaningful cost to waiting until you have read the prospectus.

Our read is this. If you want safety, buy the CD. If you want to build wealth, buy the Nasdaq-100 outright and keep all the upside. If you want current income and you accept that your total return will trail the index over a full cycle, then a well-run covered-call fund like QQQI is a reasonable tool, and Perry’s newsletter is a cheap way to have someone else watch the shelf for you. Just do not mistake one of those three goals for the other two. For more on the monthly-income side of the market, see our look at monthly dividend stocks and the tradeoffs there. If the high-yield framing is what drew you in, our high-yield preferred stocks explainer walks through a different corner of the income shelf with the same “is the yield the whole story” lens.

Where to Learn More

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