Berkshire Hathaway Pays No Dividend. This ETF Holds Its Stocks and Pays Out 15% a Year, Monthly. Here’s the Catch

Warren Buffett’s longstanding preference has been to retain capital when Berkshire can put it to better use, whether that’s maintaining a fortress balance sheet, repurchasing shares opportunistically, buying publicly traded stocks, or acquiring entire businesses outright. That means no dividends.

I’ve always liked that approach. If I owned Berkshire Hathaway and needed income, I’d rather sell shares periodically and manufacture my own dividend. Another possibility for someone holding at least 100 Class B shares is selling covered calls, although that introduces its own trade-off by capping some upside if the stock rallies through the strike price.

But what if you want exposure to Berkshire’s stock-picking philosophy while receiving a large monthly distribution without managing an options strategy yourself? One unusual solution is the VistaShares Target 15 Berkshire Select Income ETF (OMAH).

It owns a portfolio heavily influenced by Berkshire’s publicly disclosed equity holdings and layers an options strategy on top, targeting a 15% annual distribution paid monthly. That’s a lot of income. It’s also important to understand what OMAH has to do to generate it.

What’s Inside OMAH?

OMAH has grown to roughly $1 billion in assets under management and charges a 0.95% expense ratio. Its portfolio draws heavily from Berkshire’s publicly disclosed equity investments, while also holding Berkshire itself. Here are its largest positions:

This gives investors something different from owning Berkshire directly. Berkshire is much more than its 13F portfolio. Its value also comes from wholly owned operating businesses, insurance operations and float, its enormous liquidity position, and management’s ability to allocate capital among all of those opportunities.

OMAH instead provides a way to isolate much of Berkshire’s publicly traded stock portfolio and turn it into an income strategy. The fund targets an annual distribution equal to 15% of NAV, which works out to approximately 1.25% each month. Its latest distribution was $0.2245 per share against a $17.66 NAV.

But investors shouldn’t confuse a 15% distribution target with a 15% investment return. As of the fund’s most recent distribution, 37.50% was estimated to be return of capital (ROC). That figure comes from the fund’s Section 19a-1 notice and remains an estimate. Investors won’t know the final tax characterization until they receive Form 1099-DIV after year-end.

ROC also isn’t automatically a bad thing. Depending on its final tax characterization, it can defer taxes by reducing an investor’s cost basis rather than immediately being treated as ordinary income. What matters is whether the portfolio generates enough total return over time to support its distributions without persistently eroding NAV.

The Catch Behind a 15% Target

There are several reasons I’d hesitate before treating OMAH’s 15% distribution as something I could simply collect indefinitely. The first is concentration. Financial stocks account for roughly 38% of the portfolio, while Apple and Berkshire alone represent more than 20%. That’s considerably different from owning a broadly diversified U.S. equity ETF.

The second is the size of the distribution target itself. A 15% annual payout is way above the S&P 500’s long-term annualized total return of around 10%. OMAH isn’t promising to earn 15% annually, but maintaining a distribution that high requires the portfolio’s dividends, option premiums, realized gains and potentially ROC to collectively support substantial cash payments.

That could become difficult during a prolonged bear market. Lower volatility could also reduce the premiums available from selling options, while a powerful bull market can create the opposite problem: covered-call strategies may surrender some appreciation when their options move against them.

Still, I’ll give OMAH credit for what it has accomplished so far. From March 5, 2025 through Oct. 6, 2026, a roughly 1.59-year period, OMAH produced a 12.51% cumulative total return with distributions reinvested. Berkshire Class B shares returned just 0.89% over the same period.

That’s a very short track record, so I wouldn’t extrapolate it indefinitely. But OMAH has at least demonstrated that a high distribution hasn’t prevented it from generating positive total returns so far. And if your objective is specifically to isolate Berkshire’s publicly disclosed equity holdings while receiving substantial monthly income, there really isn’t another ETF doing quite the same thing.

Therefore, I don’t think OMAH is a bad ETF as far as covered-call products go. I’d simply prefer a slightly less ambitious version of it. A target distribution closer to 12% could potentially retain more capital inside the portfolio, while an expense ratio around 0.75% would reduce the hurdle the strategy needs to overcome.

Until then, I’d view OMAH as a specialized income product rather than a substitute for Berkshire Hathaway itself. Berkshire lets management decide where capital should go next. OMAH takes a selection of those public-equity ideas and deliberately converts more of their potential return into cash today.

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