10 Dividend ETFs Ranked — I Only Own 5 of Them

Ten dividend ETFs. Five of them are in my account right now. The other five are not — and honestly, those five might be the more useful half of this post.

Because here's what nobody does. Everybody makes a list of funds they own and calls it a top ten. That's easy. What's harder, and a lot more honest, is telling you which ones you like and haven't bought — and why not.

So that's the deal today. Five I own, five I'm watching, and for every single one on that watchlist, the specific reason my money isn't in it yet. Some of those reasons might make you rethink a fund you already hold.

One thing before we start: these are my favorites, not everything I own. I hold more than this, and I hold individual stocks too — that's a whole separate post. Today is ETFs only.

What My Split Actually Shows

Before I name a single ticker, let me show you something that says more than the tickers do: how my money is actually split across these five.

More than half of the whole thing sits in a single fund — and it's not the high-yield stuff. It's the boring one.

Here's the uncomfortable part. If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you I want my monthly income higher. That's the goal — eventually ten grand a month. But if you look at where the money actually went, the biggest chunk went to the fund with the most moderate payout and the most stability. My two pure high-income funds together are the smallest slice on the board.

That's not an accident, and it's not a mistake. That's my investing DNA showing up in the spreadsheet. I'm an entrepreneur. My income swings. I'm building a physical product brand that eats cash. So when it's actually time to click buy, the boring one wins — even when my mouth says I want more income.

Watch for that in your own account. What you say you want and where your money actually goes are two different data points. The second one is the honest one.

The Five I Own

1. SCHD — the foundation

The biggest position by a mile. This is the Schwab dividend fund — roughly a hundred US companies, and the screen isn't just "who pays the most." It's a quality screen: cash flow, return on equity, a real track record of paying and raising the payment. It's about as cheap as this category gets.

It's also the only fund in my entire account where dividends automatically reinvest. Every payment buys more shares without me touching anything. That's not a small detail. Everywhere else, the cash lands and I decide what to do with it. SCHD just quietly compounds in the background. It's the one position where I took myself out of the decision on purpose, because I know myself — the version of me that has cash sitting in an account tends to find something else to do with it.

I've been adding to this one for years. Not in big chunks. Just consistently. It's the closest thing I have to a foundation.

2. DGRW — the bridge

WisdomTree's quality dividend growth fund. On paper, this sounds like a copy of SCHD. It's not, and this is worth understanding, because a lot of people accidentally buy the same fund twice and think they're diversified.

SCHD screens for quality dividend payers. DGRW screens for quality dividend payers with growth characteristics, and weights the fund based on how much cash those companies actually pay out. The result is a portfolio that leans a lot further into big tech and modern growth names than SCHD does — companies you won't find inside SCHD at all.

The tradeoff shows up immediately in the payout: DGRW pays you noticeably less today. What you're buying instead is faster-growing companies underneath the dividend. So these two aren't redundant. SCHD is my income floor. DGRW is my bridge between the income side and the growth side. Different jobs, same shelf.

3. DIVO — the experiment I'm not sure I'd repeat

I'm going to be straight with you, because this is the position I'm least confident in.

I bought it a few years ago as an experiment. Put in ten grand. I wanted to see how a covered call fund behaved in a real account with real money instead of just reading about it. It holds a small group of quality dividend stocks, twenty to twenty-five names, and the managers sell call options on some of them to squeeze extra income out on top of the dividends.

It's done fine. Between appreciation and the payments, it's grown from where I put it in. Honestly, I don't think about it — I forget it exists until my phone tells me it paid me again.

But here's the honest part: "it's working" and "I believe in it" are two completely different statements. If I were building this account from scratch today, I'm not certain DIVO makes the cut. It costs more than my core funds. The covered calls that create the income also cap the upside in strong months. And I don't have a conviction story for it the way I do for SCHD.

So why is it still there? Because it's small, it's not hurting me, and I'd rather let a small experiment keep running than churn my account just to look tidy. But I'm not going to sit here and pretend it's a high-conviction pick. It isn't.

One Thing You Need to Know Before We Go Further

Before the last two I own, I have to stop and explain something, because skipping it makes the next several funds in this post actively misleading.

Half the funds on this list don't pay dividends. Not really.

A dividend is a company earning money and sending a piece of it to you. That's it. SCHD, DGRW, most of the watchlist — that's what's happening. The high-income funds work completely differently. They own stocks, then sell options against those stocks, and the cash they collect from selling those options is what lands in your account. That's not a dividend. That's option premium.

And here's where it gets weirder. A chunk of what these funds pay you often gets labeled return of capital. In plain English, the tax man treats part of that payment as your own money coming back to you rather than as income.

Don't hear that as "it's fake money." The cash is real; it spends the same. But here's the part people miss: the tax doesn't vanish. Return of capital lowers what the government thinks you paid for those shares. So the bill doesn't disappear — it just moves down the road to whenever you sell. It's a deferral, not a discount.

Used right, that can genuinely work in your favor. Used blind, you get a nasty surprise years later. Either way, you need to know it's happening, because a headline payout number on a covered call fund and a dividend yield on SCHD are not the same species of number. Stacking them side by side on a screener will walk you straight into a bad decision.

If you take one thing from this entire post, take that one. And then talk to an actual tax professional, because I'm not one.

4. QQQI — Nasdaq income, built right

This is a Nasdaq fund with a call strategy bolted on top. It owns the big Nasdaq names you'd expect, then sells index options against that portfolio and pays the premium out monthly.

Two things I like. First, it uses index options rather than a workaround structure, which has real tax consequences that generally work in the holder's favor. Second, as we just covered, a large share of what it pays out gets classified as return of capital, which defers the tax hit instead of hitting you every single year.

The catch: this fund is young. It hasn't lived through a genuinely brutal, extended bear market yet. And when the Nasdaq rips, those calls cap how much of that run you actually get. You're trading upside for cash flow. That's the deal, and you should want that deal before you buy it, not find out about it after.

This is one I want to add to. I've said I'm waiting for the right moment — which, I'll say it before the comments do, is market timing.

5. JEPQ — the same idea, different engine

JPMorgan's Nasdaq income fund. On the surface, this looks like the exact same fund as QQQI — same index, same idea, income from selling calls on Nasdaq exposure. So why own both?

Because the machinery underneath is different, JEPQ builds its option exposure through a different instrument than QQQI does, and that difference shows up at tax time. JEPQ's payouts are generally more straightforward, and "more straightforward" often means less favorable. QQQI's structure leans more tax-efficient. On the other side, JEPQ is bigger, older, and cheaper to own.

So I'm not double-buying. I'm holding two versions of the same idea, built by two different engineers, and I'd rather have exposure to both approaches than bet everything on one structure being the right one.

One honest note on placement: both of these sit in my regular brokerage account, not a retirement account. I've argued on this channel before that high-income funds are often better off in a tax-sheltered account, and that's still true. But there's a hard limit on how much I can put into retirement accounts each year, and as an entrepreneur, I want access to my capital without a penalty if an opportunity shows up. So I made a trade-off with my eyes open. That's not me ignoring the rule — that's me knowing exactly what the rule costs and paying it on purpose.

Quick aside, because it connects directly: the number I actually care about isn't my yield. It's what percentage of my monthly bills my dividends currently cover. That's the number that tells you how free you actually are. Mine is nowhere near a hundred. But it moves, and watching it move is one of the most motivating things in my financial life. I built a free tool around that idea — the Dividend Coverage Tracker — if you want to run your own numbers, the link is on the site.

The Five I'm Watching (And Why I Haven't Bought Them)

Everything I own is on the table. Now the part I think is genuinely more useful.

These next five are funds I like and don't own, ranked from the one I'd buy last to the one I'd buy tomorrow. Here's the frame: I don't have unlimited cash. Most of my money is going into a house, into real estate, and into a physical product brand that eats capital faster than anything I've ever built. So the honest question isn't "is this fund good?" It's: if a windfall showed up — a good quarter, a property sale, something I'm not even planning on — what order would I actually buy these in?

5. CHPY — the one I'd buy last

This one's the outlier, and I want to be extremely clear about it. It's a YieldMax fund. It holds a concentrated group of semiconductor companies — one sector — and sells options against them, paying out weekly.

It costs several times what my core funds cost. It's non-diversified by design. And it launched last year, so it has almost no track record. It has never seen a real semiconductor downturn. Not one.

So why is it on the list at all? Because I like a little risk and I'm honest about that. There's a version of my portfolio where a small amount goes into something with real asymmetry — something that could genuinely rip. Emphasis on small.

Hear me clearly: this does not belong in the same mental category as SCHD. If you take one name off this list and go buy it because I mentioned it, do not let it be this one. This is the last dollar I'd deploy, not the first.

4. SPYD — what pure yield-chasing looks like

Dead simple concept: it takes the S&P 500 and holds the eighty highest-yielding names in it. Yield, and nothing else.

That gets you a bigger payout than most of the traditional funds on this list, and that's exactly the problem. When you screen purely for high yield, you catch companies whose yield is high because the stock fell. Sometimes that's a bargain. Sometimes it's a company about to cut its dividend, and you just bought the last check.

The long-run numbers back that up — over a ten-year stretch, SPYD has meaningfully lagged the broader high-yield funds, even though it pays more. It also concentrates heavily into real estate, staples, and utilities.

I keep it on the list because I think everybody should understand what pure yield-chasing actually looks like in practice. But it's number four for a reason.

3. SPYI — the same idea wearing different clothes

Same company that runs QQQI. Same strategy. Same tax machinery. Just pointed at the S&P 500 instead of the Nasdaq. That's the whole pitch, and it's also the whole problem: if I already own the Nasdaq version, buying the S&P version isn't a new idea.

There is one scenario where I buy it, and it's a real one. Right now, both of my high-income funds are Nasdaq-based. That means my income is riding on one slice of one part of the market. If tech has a bad couple of years, my cash flow feels it twice. SPYI would spread that out.

So this isn't a no. It's a "not until that concentration bothers me more than it does today." And it's creeping up on me.

2. VYM — a fund I respect with no role to play

Vanguard's high dividend yield fund. Hundreds of companies, one of the cheapest funds you can buy anywhere, and a long history behind it. About as boring and as solid as this category gets.

Here's the part I find genuinely interesting. Compared to SPYD, VYM pays you less and has done better over the long run — broader, more diversified, less yield-chasing. That single comparison is worth more than most investing advice you'll get this year.

So why don't I own it? Honestly, because it overlaps heavily with what SCHD already does for me. Buying VYM wouldn't add a new job to my portfolio. It'd hire a second employee to do the job SCHD is already doing. If I didn't own SCHD, VYM would probably be my core holding instead. But I do. So it sits at number two — a fund I genuinely respect that doesn't currently have a role.

1. DVY — the one I'd buy tomorrow

iShares' select dividend fund. Around a hundred companies, screened on things like dividend growth and payout discipline. Critically, it's been running since 2003 — which means it's lived through 2008 and 2020. Most of the high-income funds on this list have lived through neither.

But the real reason it's number one is what's inside it. DVY leans hard into utilities and financials — those two are roughly half the fund. That's a completely different flavor from everything else I own. My account is heavy in quality large caps and Nasdaq tech. DVY would give me something my portfolio genuinely does not have right now.

There's a bonus angle I keep thinking about, too: utilities are sitting in the middle of the biggest demand story in a generation. Every data center getting built for AI needs an enormous amount of power, and utilities are the ones selling it. I'm not calling that a guarantee of anything, but it's an interesting place to have some exposure.

The knock, and it's a real one, is cost. DVY charges meaningfully more than my core Schwab and Vanguard funds. Over decades, that compounds against you. It's the single reason I've hesitated. But if a windfall hit tomorrow? This is the first buy. No hesitation.

The Cash I Haven't Moved

Which brings us back to that cash. I've got money sitting from a fund I sold a while back that I still haven't redeployed. It's been sitting for months. I just told you, in writing, that I'd buy DVY without thinking twice. And I haven't done it. That's market timing. I know better. I'm still doing it. I'm not going to pretend otherwise — and when I finally move it, you'll see it here, win or mistake.

What I Actually Want You to Take Away

Here's what I hope you actually take away, and it isn't a ticker.

The five I own aren't better than the five I don't. They're the ones that matched my situation at the moment I had money to put to work. Different situation, different list.

A twenty-eight-year-old with a steady paycheck and forty years of runway should probably own almost nothing in my high-income bucket. Their money should be compounding, not paying them. Paying yourself early costs you the back half of the curve.

I'm not that guy. I'm approaching fifty. No inheritance, no safety net. My income swings with businesses I'm still building. I want assets that pay me whether the market's green or red. That's my situation driving my list. Not the other way around.

So don't copy my top five. Figure out what job you actually need your money to do, and then go find the funds that do that job.

Watch the full video above, or on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qSmXGhFmDhI