YieldMax has launched another single-stock option-income fund, this time built around one of the market’s most-watched newcomers: SpaceX. The YieldMax® SPCX Option Income Strategy ETF (NYSEARCA:YSPC) began trading on NYSE Arca in mid-July 2026, with a prospectus dated July 12, 2026. It is issued through Tidal Trust II, with Tidal Investments LLC serving as adviser, and joins YieldMax’s growing lineup of income ETFs tied to a single underlying stock.
The fund carries an expense ratio of 1.01%, gross and net, which works out to about $101 a year on a $10,000 investment. That fee is in line with other YieldMax single-stock income funds and well above what a plain index ETF charges. According to the prospectus, YSPC’s primary objective is current income, and its secondary objective is exposure to Space Exploration Technologies Corporation Class A common stock (SPCX), subject to a limit on the fund’s participation in gains.
What the Fund Does
YSPC is an actively managed ETF, meaning a portfolio team picks and adjusts the holdings rather than tracking an index. The strategy itself is an options overlay. Rather than owning SpaceX shares outright, the fund uses options contracts on SPCX to generate income while getting synthetic exposure to the stock’s price. Under its prospectus, the fund commits to investing at least 80% of net assets, plus borrowings, in securities and financial instruments that provide indirect exposure to SPCX, with the notional value of options contracts counting toward that test.
Notional value is worth pausing on. It refers to the full face value of a position rather than the capital actually committed. That is how a fund can reference a large amount of stock exposure while posting only a fraction of that amount as collateral. In practice, YieldMax funds typically sell call options against their synthetic long positions. The premiums collected become the income the fund distributes. The trade-off: if SpaceX shares rally hard, the fund’s upside is capped by those sold calls, while the downside if SpaceX falls is largely intact.
Why It Exists and How It Stacks Up
YieldMax built its brand on funds tied to Tesla, NVIDIA, MicroStrategy, and Coinbase, all of which apply the same synthetic-covered-call template to a volatile single stock. SpaceX, freshly public with a market capitalization of roughly $928.7 billion and a business spanning launch, Starlink satellite broadband, and (after the early-2026 xAI acquisition) artificial intelligence, is a natural fit for that playbook.
YSPC is the first ETF built specifically to sell options on SPCX for income. Direct competitors do not yet exist, though the broader category of single-stock covered-call ETFs from issuers such as Kurv and Roundhill charges fees in a similar range. Investors comparing YSPC against simply owning SPCX shares should note that SpaceX itself pays no dividend, so any yield from YSPC comes entirely from the options strategy, not from the underlying company.
Who It Might Suit, and the Risks
The fund is designed for investors who want cash distributions tied to a highly volatile stock and are willing to give up part of the upside to get them. The prospectus notes distributions are generally taxable as ordinary income, qualified dividend income, or capital gains, which is worth understanding before holding it in a taxable account.
The risks are meaningful. YSPC has no track record: the fund has not yet paid a distribution, so the actual yield is unknown. In its first five trading days, shares moved from $49.96 on July 15 to $46.16 on July 21, a decline of 7.61%, and closed at $46.06 on July 21. SPCX itself has been rough lately, down 33.22% over the past month from a start price of $185 on June 18 to $123.54 on July 21. Because the option strategy caps gains but not losses, a sustained drawdown in SPCX can erode the fund’s net asset value even while distributions are being paid, meaning yield can effectively come out of principal.
New ETFs also tend to launch with small assets and wider bid-ask spreads, and funds that fail to gather assets sometimes close. The fund’s total net assets were not disclosed in the prospectus.
What to watch from here: the size and frequency of YSPC’s first distributions, how much of its NAV holds up during SpaceX’s volatile early trading life, and whether assets under management build enough to keep the fund viable through its first year.
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