$10,000 in MSTY Became $6,614 Before the Tax Bill: The Cost of Riding MSTR’s Volatility

MSTY lost 70% of its value over the past year, turning a $10,000 stake into roughly $6,600 even as weekly distributions from MSTR's covered-call strategy kept arriving. Distributions are taxed as ordinary income and portions arrive as return of capital, stacking tax drag directly on top of MSTY's structural NAV erosion. JEPI and XYLD spread covered-call income across hundreds of names at a fraction of MSTY's cost, eliminating the single-stock volatility risk that drives its headline yield.

It sounds nuts, but SoFi1 is giving new Active Invest users up to $3,000 in stock for a limited time, and all it takes is a $50 deposit to get started.2 See for yourself (Sponsor) If you put $10,000 into MSTY a year ago, then you watched it shrink to roughly $6,614 before the IRS even sent a bill. The weekly checks kept landing, but the account balance kept sinking. That gap in income and performance is the entire product story.

YieldMax MSTR Option Income Strategy ETF (NYSEARCA:MSTY) sells call options against synthetic exposure to MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR) stock. The pitch is income, and the fund's headline expense ratio is only part of the drag. The more significant cost is structural: when MSTR drops, MSTY holds the downside; when MSTR rips higher, the short calls cap the upside.

Essentially, you get the losses and rent out the gains. The price action tells the story. MSTY closed at $12.27 on August 12, 2026, down 69.72% over the trailing year from $41.02.

Year to date, the fund is down 31.48% from $18.13. Distributions have not made up for that underperformance. Per-share payouts peaked at $4.4213 on the November 21, 2024 ex-date and have compressed to just $0.2083 as of the August 6, 2026 ex-date.

The trailing 12-month distribution total sits at $15.8652 per share, but the share price backing it is worth a fraction of what it was at the end of last year. SoFi Active Invest is offering a limited-time promotion. Open an account, fund it with $50 or more, and you could receive up to $3,000 in complimentary stock for Active Invest accounts.