VOO vs. YMAX -- Juggernaut vs. Ant
How does Vanguard's $588.2 Billion Juggernaut VOO stack up against YieldMax's $651.8 million dollar ant YMAX?
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So I was kind of curious about VOO because everyone keeps talking about how great it is.
And Boggle and Friends have somehow accumulated $588.2 billion in a fund which pays them (0.0003 * 588,195,000,000=) $176,458,500.00 a year in fees for something a sixth-grader could do. With crayons.
Which is just so ridiculous is makes you want to either cry. Or be Jon Boggle. Ok, you want to cry.
So VOO opened its doors on September 10, 2010. At an opening price of $101.78.
So with today's price of $547.08, that's a $445.30 capital gain or a... (445.03/101.78 =) 437.51% capital gain.
Divide that by the number of months (171.62) and you get... 2.54% per month in capital gains. Except... no one realistically bought their shares back in 2010 so that is "pie in the sky" thinking as far as the future goes.
Total dividends for the time period were: $59.67 (source https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/etf/voo/dividend-history )
So $59.67 in total dividends divided by $101.78 (starting price) gives you at total yield of 58.62%... except, you need to divide that by the total number of months, which is again 171.62 or a monthly yield of 0.34% per month. Which is kind of pitiful but also again just isn't happening because we are no longer in 2010.
Which gives you a grand total (again, if you'd bought your shares way back in September of 2010) an overall return (cap gains + yield) of… 2.89% per month, more or less. But only if you’d held on to your shares for the past 14 years.
But unfortunately, we don't have a time machine, so the real picture for VOO is more like this—which is VOO'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 VOO 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 0.1004% per month, and 0.1311% per month, depending on where you bought VOO—i.e. numbers so small we actually had to take them out to four decimal place to differentiate them.
Total yield since the beginning of the year is in yellow — 1.54% — which is pretty low. But this is a “growth” fund so that is not unusual.
Add in the cap gains since Jan 1, 2024 (26.05%) and you've got a total of 27.60% for the year or about 2.32% per month. Which is actually pretty good.
We’ve already been through this part in another post 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 VOO’s yield by a mile (actually by 24X), 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 VOO stores value mostly in the capital gains (26.05%), and YMAX in the distributions (37.23%).
Which brings us back around to the perpetual question of the tradeoff between high yields and stock price.
As I mentioned in the other post, 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.
VOO is slightly better here, 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.
If you rolled the calendar back a year, VOO looked like this (1/1/2023 through 12/31/2023) where “current price” is the price on 12/31/2023 and “initial price” is from 1/1/2023:
Meaning it still would have edged out YMAX — but not by that much. 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? Exactly that, VOO and YMAX are pretty much a draw when you come right down to it — 0.27% — a quarter of a percentage point per month difference in 2024 separates them, and 0.07% if you compare VOO’s 2023 with YMAX’s (incomplete) 2024.
Which means… the Boggle-verse will tremble. LOL!
I hope you enjoyed this. 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.
