Before spot BTC ETFs were approved, a asset produced by ProShares was already active. Starting in October 19th of 2021 you could buy this ETF. It produces dividends based on futures trading. So depending how volatile the price action was during that month, and how well the Proshares futures traders did would depend on how much the dividend pay out. Some months the payout may be zero, others its massive. All depends on Bitcoins volatility.
Now I want to point out this is not a spot BTC asset, it does follow Bitcoins price but not closely such as the recent Bitcoin spot ETFs do.
Take a look at the chart above, that is BTC-USD compared to BITO over one year. We can see it does follow the price of Bitcoin. But has some ups and downs but only off by around 5 percent the end of this year. Early this year it followed much more closely. But again that is not what this asset is meant to do, its meant to produce dividends.
Above we can see the BTC-USD chart compared to IBIT. Which is Blackrocks spot BTC asset. It follows so closely we can barely see any divergence.
So lets talk about the dividends, they are what this asset by Proshares is known for.
2023 ranged from 0 up to 20 percent annual dividend yield.
2024 ranged from 11.32 percent all the way up to 67 percent annual dividend yield.
2025 ranged from 48 percent and over 83 percent at its highest for the year.
These are huge yields, most “high yield” dividends do not surpass 5%
Not every month has a guaranteed distribution. It has been 0 on at least one month while I was holding it.
I bought BITO back in 2022 when Bitcoin was around $20,000
Watching previous cycles, I decided this was pretty close to this cycles low. Of course I could be wrong, but based on my observations it was what I decided. And sure enough it was pretty close to the bottom. I held the asset all the way through 2025 and finally sold once I was approaching my buy in price. I set a stop loss for just a percent of two above what I paid for it. And it finally triggered, and I sold all of my BITO assets. I did not want to be at a capitol loss, so I decided to sell before then.
But for many years, it produced an amazing amount of income. And I was not in the red for much at all during the run up. Not until we saw Bitcoin drop back into the $80k range did that happen years later.
So would I buy now? No, I would buy it at Bitcoins bottom for the cycle again possibly. Sometime before the next block halving. But once that next halving is coming up and we see a huge drop in price, it may be a nice asset to hold onto producing income.
Some even say if you rolled all of the dividends earned back into BITO, it would produce more than what a spot BTC ETF or just holding actual BTC can do. Honestly I did not do the math on that, but it is interesting to consider.
We are not there, in my opinion. None of this is financial advise, do your own research and make your own decisions.
But I did want to share my gem I found, and how much it has helped me out producing income for the farm until we can produce it on our own farming garlic which we hope to have our first harvest coming this year.
