QDTE Dividend Calculator
Roundhill Daily 0DTE QQQ Option Income ETF — Project your returns with dividend reinvestment (DRIP). Pays weekly.
Scenarios
Three realistic paths for high-yield funds: yield holds, yield compresses, yield normalizes. Click any card to load it.
What is QDTE?
QDTE takes the covered-call concept to its extreme: every single trading day, the fund sells call options on the Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) that expire that same day — zero days to expiration, or 0DTE. This is a fundamentally different strategy from weekly or monthly options writing.
How QDTE generates income
QDTE takes the covered-call concept to its extreme: every single trading day, the fund sells call options on the Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) that expire that same day — zero days to expiration, or 0DTE. This is a fundamentally different strategy from weekly or monthly options writing.
Why daily? Options lose value fastest in their final hours before expiration — a phenomenon called theta decay. A 0DTE option that's out of the money at 9:30 AM will lose most of its remaining value by 4:00 PM, even if the market barely moves. QDTE harvests this accelerated decay every day, collecting small premiums that add up to large annualized yields.
The daily reset is both a feature and a risk. On the feature side: if the market gaps against you one day, the damage is limited to that day's position — tomorrow you start fresh. On the risk side: on days when the Nasdaq rallies sharply intraday, QDTE misses that move because the sold calls cap the upside for the day.
Distributions are paid weekly (aggregated from the daily premium collection). The strategy is relatively new in ETF form and the ROC percentages have been high, reflecting that much of the distributed "income" is capital return. XDTE applies the identical strategy to the S&P 500 (SPY) instead of the Nasdaq 100.
About the QDTE Dividend Calculator
This QDTE dividend calculator projects how your position grows with and without DRIP (Dividend Reinvestment). Every input is prefilled with live QDTE data — current price, latest per-share distribution, detected payment frequency, and historical CAGR — so you can hit calculate immediately, or override any field to model your own assumptions.
The QDTE DRIP calculator runs two parallel scenarios: one where every distribution is reinvested into more QDTE shares, and one where distributions are taken as cash and never compounded. The gap between the two curves is the compounding premium — the extra wealth you build by letting QDTE dividends buy more shares over time. Extra monthly contributions, tax rates, and custom dividend growth rates are all supported, and every calculation runs in your browser with no additional API calls after page load.
Why this calculator is more accurate than most
Traditional DRIP calculators treat dividend-per-share and share-price as two independent quantities that grow at their own separate rates. That works fine for stocks like SCHD or KO, where management sets the payout and the stock price moves with the business. It breaks badly for option-income ETFs like MSTY, NVDY, or TSLY, where distributions are sourced from option premium on the underlying — meaning the dividend dollar is mechanically a fraction of NAV, not a separate variable. Let those two quantities compound independently and you get absurd outputs (trillion-dollar portfolios from $10K) because the implied yield silently grows to 400%+ as price collapses faster than the dollar dividend.
We solve this with two projection modes. Dividend Growth mode is the standard model — correct for dividend-growth stocks and traditional income ETFs. Yield-on-NAV mode (auto-selected when starting yield exceeds 20%) locks the forward yield and recomputes distributions each year asyield × current NAV, so as price falls, dividend-per-share falls proportionally. This matches the physics of option-income funds and produces realistic projections instead of fantasy numbers.
You can toggle between the two modes above the input form. For QDTE, dividend-growth mode is the default and matches how most investors think about this asset.
Yield on Cost — the metric that matters for QDTE long-term holders
The yearly projection table includes a YoC (Yield on Cost) column. Yield on cost is your annual dividend income divided by what you originally paid — not by what QDTE is worth today. For a dividend-growth ETF, this is the single most important long-term number, because it reflects how the rising payout compounds against your fixed cost basis. A QDTE position bought today might yield 41.9% up front, but at historical dividend growth rates it can compound to a 7-12% YoC over 15-20 years without you adding a dollar. That is the "snowball" effect long-term QDTE holders are paying for, and it is invisible if you only look at headline yield.
The two levers that change results the most are the growth assumptions and the holding period. For a volatile, high-yield fund, a 0% or slightly negative growth assumption is usually more realistic than extrapolating a historical CAGR, because distribution levels often decay as implied volatility normalizes. For stable dividend ETFs and index funds, the 5Y CAGR is a reasonable baseline. The QDTE dividend history page shows every past payment in detail, and the total return analyzer strips out NAV erosion to show your real yield.