JEPI vs. YMAX -- Kickboxer vs. Ant
How does JP Morgan's $37.33 billion kickboxer JEPI stack up against YieldMax's $651.8 million dollar ant YMAX?
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So I was kind of curious about JEPI because one of the other folks on this site was talking about how much money they have in it.
So JP Morgan has accumulated $37.33 billion in JEPI on which they get a 0.35% management fee. That pays them (0.0035 * 37,330,000,000=) $130,655,000.00 a year in fees.
Sigh.
So JEPI opened its doors on May 22, 2020. At an opening price of $50.09.
So with today's price of $57.96, that's a $7.87 capital gain or a... (7.87/50.09 =) 15.71% capital gain.
Divide that by the number of months (55.26) and you get... 0.28% per month in capital gains.
Total dividends for the time period were: $21.17 (source https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/etf/jepi/dividend-history)
So $21.17 in total dividends divided by $50.09 (starting price) gives you at total yield of 42.26%... except, you need to divide that by the total number of months, which is again 55.26, or a monthly yield of 0.76% per month. Which is pretty good.
Which gives you a grand total (again, if you'd bought your shares way back in May 2020) an overall return (cap gains + yield) of… 1.05% per month, more or less (see last row of table).
But unfortunately, we can’t go back four years in time, so the real picture for JEPI is more like this—which is JEPI's performance over the past year (since 1/1/2024).
Where you've got your initial price (1/1/2024), current price (12/29/2024), high, and low prices, and your dividend total.
And following that are the various yields if you'd bought JEPI today (current price), or at the high, low, or way back on Jan 1, 2024 (initial price).
This is way more realistic because it gives you a feel for what's actually happening right now -- or at least in the not-to-far-distant past (the preceding year).
Which means actual yield is somewhere in the range between 0.5391% per month, and 0.6009% per month, depending on where you bought JEPI.
Total yield since the beginning of the year is in yellow — 7.12% — which is pretty low especially for an “income” fund. But 7.12% is about the limit of everyone’s expectations for dividends so I guess that’s ok.
Add in the cap gains since Jan 1, 2024 (5.15%) and you've got a total of 12.27% for the year or about 1.03% per month. Which is ok and is not much different from JEPI’s overall numbers since 2020 — so JEPI is pretty consistent, overall.
We’ve already been through this part in another post as well as in this one but let's compare that to YMAX (a YieldMax stock) over the same period.
Now YMAX is a highly diversified ETF that holds 28 other YieldMax stocks. See:
So it’s not as good as some of YieldMax’s best stuff, but also not as bad as its worst. To see more check out the current full YieldMax review.
So YieldMax has it's own problems. But when you compare the two, YMAX beats JEPI’s yield by a mile (actually by 5.2X), even though YMAX takes a hit on capital gains.
YMAX also just started this year (1/19/2024) so has a slightly shorter performance history (11.33 months).
So same deal as the table above: initial (1/19/2024) price, current price (12/29/2024) and the high and low.
Then the number of months, followed by yields depending where you bought it.
Total yield over the time period (yellow) and average yield per month (blue).
So YMAX's yield averages between 3.01%/month and 3.89%/month.
But the overall picture is actually in the final line of both tables -- the overall Gain/Loss per month which includes BOTH yield + capital gain.
Which means that JEPI isn’t doing that great in either cap gains (5.15%) or yield (7.12%) but the combo is again ok (12.27% over the past year).
YMAX stores (and distributes) its value primarily in the distributions (37.23%).
Which brings us back around to the perpetual question of the tradeoff between high yields and stock price.
YMAX goes all in for dividends at the expense of the stock price. JEPI is kind of a fence sitter. It’s not like VOO (26.05% in capital gains) and its yield is less than SCHD’s (9.59% yield) — see both articles for details.
As I mentioned in the other posts, I think the answer is that basically there is no "free" money anywhere. The money has to come from somewhere, so you really do end up kind of picking one or the other.
And JEPI doesn’t really pick either.
YMAX is better here (2.05%/month) than JEPI (1.03%/month), but I think with all of this stuff, you have to look at cap gains AND yields together in order to figure out what's actually going on.
And you have to give JEPI credit — it is consistent. And since a lot of people use JEPI for retirement income, it’s good that it is that consistent.
If you rolled the calendar back a year, JEPI looked like this (1/1/2023 through 12/31/2023) where “current price” is the price from 12/31/2023 and “initial price” is from 1/1/2023:
Meaning YMAX — would have been even better here. And it should be noted that YMAX didn’t have quite a full year so probably would have clocked a slightly higher divided—a couple of weeks worth, anyway.
So what conclusion can you draw here? YMAX edges out JEPI over the past year by about 1% per month. That’s pretty much the dragon’s toenails. Once again YMAX holds its own against a Mega fund.
I hope you enjoyed this (especially the AI gone wrong picture at the top, LOL!). That's what we do here at Dividend Farmer pretty much exclusively — have a lot of fun with data. We hope you will join us.
Data-driven answers. No BS.
