A 45% annual yield sounds like the kind of promise you’d hear from a DeFi protocol right before a rug pull. But this one comes from a regulated ETF trading on a major US exchange, and it’s built on one of the hottest sectors in traditional finance: semiconductors.
The YieldMax Semiconductor Portfolio Option Income ETF, trading under the ticker CHPY, launched in April 2025 and has been turning heads with a distribution rate of 45.16%. The fund generates that income by selling call spreads on a curated basket of 15 to 30 semiconductor stocks, many of them riding the AI infrastructure wave that has defined equity markets over the past two years.
How the sausage gets made
CHPY collects premium by writing call options on its semiconductor holdings. Think of it like renting out your house on Airbnb. You get steady income, but you’ve agreed to let someone else use the property, which in financial terms means you’re capping your upside if those stocks rip higher.
But that 45.16% number deserves some scrutiny. The fund’s 30-day SEC yield sits at 0.00%. In English: the standardized yield metric that strips out return of capital and other non-income components shows essentially zero net investment income. The distributions investors are receiving aren’t purely “dividends” in the traditional sense. A significant portion likely consists of return of capital, which is your own money coming back to you, repackaged as a payout.
