OppenFolio is built like a nuclear reactor. That’s not just branding.

There’s a reactive core, dangerous, high-yield instruments that are guaranteed to decay over time. And there’s a containment shell, stable, income-heavy ballast that keeps the system from melting down.

Some call this a barbell strategy. I call it fuel management.

Why I Built It This Way

Before OppenFolio, I used to run what you’d call safe income portfolios. The kind of thing a conservative retiree might live off. They paid $200–300/month, just enough to fund whatever project I was obsessed with that year without bothering my wife or risking our capital. When we wanted the money back, it was still right there for us to use.

But then I stumbled into a new income stream, something I hadn’t planned on, and I asked myself:

What happens if I stop trying to preserve capital, and instead try to generate power?

So I did what no sane broker would ever recommend. I opened eTrade, ran their ETF screener, and sorted by yield.

Top of the list? ETFs with yields over 100%. Some over 200%. They weren’t just risky. They were radioactive.

The YieldMax Black Hole

Every single YieldMax ETF looks like a trap. Charts that slope downward. Expense ratios over 1%. Products so volatile that a sudden rate cut or liquidity crunch could wipe them out in days.

These aren’t investments. They’re fuel rods.

And just like real radioactive material, they are meant to decay. That’s what they do. You don’t hoard fuel rods in a warehouse. You burn them. You extract energy, then discard what’s left.

Most investors look at these charts and see danger. I looked and thought:

What if I can build a system that knows exactly how long to hold one… and when to let go?

Two Indicators Power the Reactor

Before I deployed a single dollar, I ran simulations. I asked every scary question:
What if there’s a black swan?
What if rates crash?
What if liquidity dries up overnight?

In every case, YieldMax symbols got obliterated. But what I found was this: if you treat them like disposable energy, not permanent holdings, the math starts to make sense.

So I built two custom metrics:

  • YES (Yield Efficiency Score)
    Measures how much yield a symbol is generating relative to its rate of NAV decay. In short: is the juice worth the squeeze?

  • T9Y (Trailing 90-Day Yield)
    Normalizes income across assets with different payout schedules. Weekly, monthly, sporadic, it all gets boiled down to one number:
    How much new money did this thing create in the past 90 days?

Together, YES and T9Y form the core logic of the OppenFolio scripts. They tell me when a symbol is underpriced for what it’s yielding, or when the decay has started to outpace the return.

You Can’t Just YOLO These

If you try to hold YieldMax ETFs like normal stocks, you’ll fail. The swings are too violent. A single symbol can drop 20% in two days. Even if you know the yield is worth it, your brain won’t let you hold on.

That’s why the system exists. That’s why we built scripts. Because I know I’d panic too.

But the other answer, the real answer, is this:

You can’t build your entire portfolio out of fuel rods.

You need structure. A casing. Something to absorb the radiation.

The Shell Is Coming

That’s the purpose of the shell: to stabilize the chaos and make the burn sustainable. The shell buys us time. It gives us breathing room. It lets us lose less on red days, and still capture green ones.

Next post, I’ll go deeper into the shell itself, how we chose the symbols, why some are controversial, and how we balance it all out.

But the bottom line is this:

YieldMax ETFs are meant to burn.
The trick is learning how to harness that fire.

Stay tuned.

You can always reach me at [email protected] if you want to go deeper.

Disclaimer: This post is for informational purposes only and reflects personal opinions, not financial advice. OppenFolio is not an investment advisory service. See site disclaimer for full details.