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ETF evolution over the past few years has come at a frenetic pace. For years, income-focused ETFs have paid monthly dividends, which investors appreciated, especially compared to the usual quarterly payouts from individual stocks.

With the advent of what are called zero-day-to-expiration (0DTE) covered call ETFs, there are now funds that pay weekly dividends. With 0DTEs, the ETFs sell calls that expire on the same day, so they earn a small amount of premium income each day, which works out well for paying weekly dividends to investors.

Besides the 0DTE ETFs from YieldMax, Roundhill, and Defiance, other ETF sponsors have jumped on the weekly dividend bandwagon. In our ETF Income Edge newsletter portfolio, eight of the 14 recommended ETFs pay dividends every week.

Now, the folks at Defiance are stepping up the game—or going around the bend—by offering an ETF that pays twice a week.

The Nasdaq 100 LightningSpread Income ETF (QLDY), which launched on September 17, is the first ETF to offer twice-weekly dividend payments. Here is the fund strategy description from the Defiance ETFs website:

The Fund uses its proprietary LightningSpread™ strategy, which combines two approaches:

• Synthetic equity exposure through deep in-the-money call options on the Nasdaq-100, providing participation in equity market performance.
• Daily option premium generation through the systematic sale of zero-days-to-expiration (0DTE) put spreads, seeking to capture rapid time decay from short-dated options.

The use of put spreads is a different strategy. The other 0DTE ETFs are selling daily calls. The current Defiance 0DTE funds initially started selling put spreads, but it did not work out well. They changed those funds to a daily call-selling strategy.

According to my research, the Nasdaq 100 Enhanced Options & 0DTE Income ETF (QQQY) changed to call option selling in March 2025. I have compared the QQQY returns to those of other QQQ tracking 0DTE ETFs, and the results are very comparable.

I plan to give QLDY some time to show what it can do, whether good or bad. 

If you are interested in high-yield, option strategy ETFs, our ETF Income Edge is a must-have subscription. We review and compare the approximately 150 high-yield ETFs to identify those that will deliver high distribution yields as actual returns to investors. We currently have 14 outstanding ETFs in our recommended portfolio. 

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