ETF 3 Monthly Income ETFs to Buy Once That Have Paid You Every Single Month for More Than a Decade Three covered call ETFs have deposited cash into investor accounts every single month for up to twelve years running, surviving a pandemic and multiple bear markets without missing a beat. The fund most income screens ignore has quietly outperformed the… By Ryne Mauck Published September 22, 2026, 5:45pm ET · 5 min read The ETF Examiner desk. Editor: Ryne Mauck . 𝕏 f ⧉ Quick Read XYLD, QYLD, and DIVO have paid uninterrupted monthly distributions for over a decade, surviving a pandemic, bear markets, and multiple rate cycles. QYLD delivers the highest yield by selling covered calls on the Nasdaq-100, but caps upside on names like NVIDIA, Apple, and Microsoft. DIVO's tactical call-writing kept most positions uncapped, generating a 220% 10-year total return that was nearly double XYLD's 124% over the same period. Just released. Our analysts combed the entire stock market and named the ten best stocks to buy right now. The report is free. Enter your email and see if any of your stocks made the cut. Financial charts and the prominent word 'DIVIDENDS' illustrate the careful planning involved in building an investment portfolio. This visual aligns with the strategy of cultivating consistent income streams. © Jack_the_sparow / Shutterstock.com Income investors who bought the Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF ( NYSEARCA:XYLD ) or Global X NASDAQ 100 Covered Call ETF ( NASDAQ:QYLD ) more than ten years ago have collected a check every single month since. Both funds trace their monthly distribution streaks back to 2013 and 2014, respectively — an unbroken cadence that survived a global pandemic, a bear market, and multiple rate cycles. The third fund on this list, the Amplify CWP Enhanced Dividend Income ETF ( NYSEARCA:DIVO ), started paying quarterly in 2016 and converted to monthly distributions in 2018, giving it eight years of monthly checks and roughly a decade of continuous distributions overall. The reason to buy any of these funds once and let them run is simple: each uses a covered call overlay on a portfolio of large caps to convert stock market volatility into monthly cash. What differs is how aggressively the call writing is applied, which index underlies the strategy, and how much upside participation the investor retains. Those distinctions determine which fund actually fits a given retirement account, taxable sleeve, or side-of-desk income bucket. How Covered Call ETFs Turn Volatility Into Rent A covered call fund owns a stock portfolio and sells short-dated call options against it. The premium collected from selling those calls becomes the fund’s income engine. When markets churn sideways or drift slowly higher, the strategy shines because the calls expire worthless and the fund keeps both the stock and the premium. When markets surge sharply, the calls get exercised, or the fund has to buy them back at a loss, capping upside. That tradeoff is the entire game. Each fund on this list makes a different choice about how much of that tradeoff to accept, and the ten-plus-year track record matters because it shows the strategy survived real stress rather than a single benign year. XYLD: The Broadest Way to Rent Out the S&P 500 XYLD sells at-the-money calls on the full S&P 500 every month, meaning essentially the entire portfolio is covered every cycle. That aggressive posture is why the fund generated $4.33 per share in trailing twelve-month distributions against a current price of $42, implying a yield of roughly 10%. Expect a mid-to-high single-digit yield depending on when you buy, and it lands in your account in twelve installments rather than four. The investment logic here is breadth. An investor who wants covered call income without a technology bet gets the entire large-cap universe as the underlying. Payment sizes do move around: recent monthly distributions have ranged from roughly $0.31 to $0.41 per share, and the fund has also occasionally sent much larger year-end payments like the $1.19 distribution in December 2024. The schedule is monthly. The amount is not fixed. The tradeoff worth understanding is capped upside. XYLD returned 124% over the past decade on a total return basis, which sounds strong until you compare it to what a plain S&P 500 fund did over the same window. The gap is the price of the income. Its 0.60% expense ratio is standard for the category. QYLD: The Highest-Yielding Option, With a Tech Concentration Warning QYLD runs the same at-the-money call-writing playbook, but on the Nasdaq-100 instead. Because tech stocks have historically carried higher implied volatility than the broader market, the options QYLD sells generate fatter premiums. That is why QYLD is usually the highest-yielding of the three, with trailing twelve-month distributions of $2.12 per share against a $19 share price. The portfolio is what you would expect. The top positions are NVIDIA at nearly 9% of net assets, Apple at 7%, Microsoft at 6%, and Amazon at 5%, with the two share classes of Alphabet together adding another chunk. Net assets sit at roughly $8.3 billion, making liquidity a non-issue. Here is where an advisor would urge caution. Because QYLD writes calls on the entire index, it caps upside on the exact stocks that have driven most of the market’s returns. Over the past decade, the fund returned 157% in total, versus a Nasdaq-100 index fund that would have done far better. QYLD is the fund to own when you want the biggest monthly check the covered call category offers, with capped upside on tech as the tradeoff. DIVO: The Contrarian Pick Most Screens Miss DIVO is the fund most income screens overlook because its headline yield looks smaller than QYLD or XYLD. That is exactly why it belongs on this list. DIVO is actively managed, holds roughly 25 blue-chip dividend payers — including Caterpillar, Apple, JPMorgan, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, and A

Nvidia Backed SB Energy’s $50 Billion Valuation Push. Wall Street Just Hit the Brakes Habib Ur Rehman Tue, September 22, 2026 at 3:17 PM PDT 3 min read NVDA AEP 9984.T SB Energy's planned public listing is turning into a stress test for the financing side of the AI buildout. The SoftBank-backed developer has slowed preparations for an IPO that had been discussed around a $50 billion valuation, according to a September 22 Financial Times report, while a $4.9 billion debt package has faced weak demand and yields around 10%. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA ) has already invested $1.5 billion and committed another $1.5 billion tied to the IPO. American Electric Power Company, Inc. (NASDAQ: AEP ) sits on the other side of the same buildout through AEP Ohio's regional power partnership around SB Energy's huge Ohio campus. The contracts are huge, but the capital bill is larger SB Energy says it has signed roughly 8.8 gigawatts of IT lease capacity, including the PORTS-Pike campus in Ohio for OpenAI. Nvidia is the exclusive AI-compute provider for that site and is providing credit support for an initial 4.25 gigawatts, with an option covering another 3.75. That is attractive for NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) because it can turn a developer's financing into future demand for GPUs, networking and systems. The risk is the scale of the guarantee structure. Nvidia has disclosed maximum guarantee exposure that can reach $105 billion under defined conditions, so the economics become more intertwined with OpenAI's ability to meet its lease obligations. Nvidia Backed a $50 Billion AI Data-Center IPO. Wall Street Just Hit the Brakes American Electric Power Company, Inc. (NASDAQ:AEP) benefits from the electricity and transmission side. AEP has about 69 gigawatts of contracted load additions through 2030, with roughly 90% tied to data centers, and the SB Energy/SoftBank regional plan includes cooperation with AEP Ohio. Large-load tariffs, collateral and termination provisions can protect utility shareholders, but proposed demand is not the same thing as completed generation and transmission. Regulatory approvals and construction timing decide when that load becomes earnings. The bond market is asking for proof Insider Monkey's database counted 285 Nvidia hedge-fund holders in Q2 2026, up from 275 in Q1, while Fisher Asset Management increased its stake about 3%. AEP had about 65 hedge-fund holders in Q2, up from roughly 62 in Q1; GQG Partners remained the largest disclosed hedge-fund holder on Insider Monkey's page with 10.26 million shares after reducing its position 32%. The filings predate the IPO slowdown. The IPO slowdown does not mean AI demand disappeared. It says investors are starting to distinguish between contracted demand and financeable returns. Nvidia can still sell the compute, and AEP can still earn on grid investment, even if SB Energy's equity valuation comes down. But when a developer with OpenAI, SoftBank and Nvidia behind it still has to pay close to double-digit debt yields, the cost of capital has officially become part of the AI thesis. Story Continues While we acknowledge the potential of NVDA and AEP as investments, we believe certain other AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock . READ NEXT: The Trillion-Dollar AI Capex Gap: Why Too Much Hardware Could Be Nvidia's Trap and Microsoft's Opportunity and Redditors Are Skeptical of SpaceX's Orbital Data Centers. Are They Right? Disclosure: None. Follow Insider Monkey on Google News . Terms and Privacy Policy Your Privacy Choices CA Privacy Notice More Info

Can This Number Push IBM Stock Higher? September 22nd, 2026 · by Trefis Team IBM YTD -20.1% SPY YTD +14.0% QQQ YTD +21.0% Analyze IBM → The number worth watching at International Business Machines (IBM) is its annual recurring revenue. It kept growing through a weak quarter. You may expect the story here to be the missed second quarter or the falling stock. It is not. So how big is this recurring revenue business, and how fast is it growing? Image from Pixabay How Big Is IBM’s Recurring Revenue Business, And How Fast Is It Growing? IBM’s software annual recurring revenue stood at $24.6 billion, management said on the fiscal Q2 2026 call. That was up 8% from a year earlier. Software as a whole makes up nearly 45% of total revenue, management said. Software revenue grew 5% in the second quarter, with flat organic growth. Recurring revenue kept rising through that quarter. So why has the stock not followed? Why Has IBM Stock Fallen While Its Annual Recurring Revenue Grew? IBM stock lost about 10% over the past year, counting dividends. The S&P 500 gained about 19% over the same time. The most recent worry is the second quarter. Management said results fell short of expectations. Clients moved spending to servers, storage and memory, and tens of large deals did not close on time. Revenue from transaction processing software fell 9% in that quarter. Annual recurring revenue answers part of this worry, because it kept growing through the same period. Management also said about one-third of the delayed deals closed in the first three weeks of the third quarter. Management read that as delay, not lost demand. The recurring business does not answer all of it. Management now expects software to grow at least 6% in 2026 . The forecast tops out at 8%. Management said the low end assumes the recent spending pattern lasts through the second half. What Would Show IBM’s Annual Recurring Revenue Is Slowing? The clearest sign would be weaker annual recurring revenue growth in IBM’s fiscal Q3 2026 report. That report is the first since the second-quarter call. Growth well below 8% would suggest the spending shift has reached recurring revenue, not just the delayed large deals. The same report will show two more things. One is whether more of the delayed deals closed. The other is whether management keeps that forecast. If annual recurring revenue keeps growing near 8% and the delayed deals keep closing, the second quarter looks like a pause. If recurring revenue growth slows, the weakness has spread beyond one quarter’s deals. How To Act On IBM? Play Offense Learn more about IBM | Identify catalysts | Generate income against IBM stock Play Defense Trim your IBM position | Tax-friendly unwind of IBM | Opt for High Quality Portfolio Learn More > https://www.trefis.com/data/v2/rankings/FetchArticleSourceCheck?gf=Article_SurprisingBuy&stock=IBM&gen=20260922&src=agent --> Invest with Trefis → More Ideas →