LOT Reddit Mentions | ChartExchange

It's because what you're comparing aren't equivalents.
A dividend is a payment of profit from a company to shareholders. A fund like SCHD selects companies that pay good dividends and then just passes them through to holders of the fund.
JEPQ and QQQI are covered call funds. They don't operate by just passing company dividends onto shareholders. Instead, they hold companies and trade options on those companies (or indexes - they all work differently). Those options generate revenue, but also have some negative effects. They then distribute the revenue earned from options trading to the shareholders.
This has several implications.
First, trading options on assets generally has an association of income and price. If the price of the fund goes down, then the distributions often go down as well. However, dividends aren't related to the price of the stock, but rather by the operations of the company, so dividends tend to be more resilient than options income.
Second, many dividend-paying companies increase the amount they pay over time, known as "dividend growth". So, as an example, they'll go from paying $1.00/share one year to paying $1.10/share the next. This creates a built-in method for increasing income. SCHD specifically screens for these types of companies, so it's a fund that primarily invests in companies that are raising their dividends.
Covered call funds, on the other hand, don't really have a mechanism for doing the same. The distributions will tend to go up and down with the price. Over the long haul, that may be fine, so long as the price continues to increase, but most covered call funds don't prioritize price appreciation. That leave it up to the investor to buy more shares if they want to increase their income in the future. And, when you run the numbers, you have to invest a LOT of your dividends to get the same type of income growth that SCHD provides.
Third, there are different tax implications between the two types of funds. SCHD pays qualified dividends, which receive preferred tax treatment. Covered call funds tend to pay ordinary income, which is taxed at a higher rate, or return of capital, which has tax advantages but also its own set of tax implications.
While you may think that SCHD's dividend yield is low, most dividend funds actually have lower yields because most companies have lower yields. Below 3% is the norm. There are very few quality companies paying above 3% yield.
Ultimately, covered call funds have kind of ruined "dividend" investing because people don't do the research necessary to understand what they are, or their strengths and weaknesses, they just look at the higher yield and they see it pays monthly over quarterly so they just go with that. These products have a use, but, IMO, it's a very limited use-case if you actually want to build a sustainable portfolio off of dividends.

.dark-mode .DcFmSH{ color: white; background-color: #333333; border: 2px solid white; }.light-mode .DcFmSH{ color: #333333; background-color: white; border: 2px solid #333333; }LOTLotus Technology Inc.stock NASDAQ ADR

LOT
Lotus Technology Inc.
stock NASDAQ ADR