Every advertised yield is technically true and practically incomplete. The number on the brochure leaves out one of two tricks, depending on the asset. In crypto, the yield is paid in a token the network is busy printing — your balance grows while your slice of the pie shrinks. In dividend land, the yield is calculated on today's price, which is a polite way of ignoring that the price fell 40% to get there. Same game, two costumes.
So we built the thing this site has been doing by hand for 40-plus posts: a Yield Calculator that puts the advertised number and the real number next to each other — 61 dividend stocks and ETFs, 14 staking coins, refreshed weekly. These are the rankings it spits out, checked October 29, 2026.
Staking: the inflation haircut
Real yield here means one subtraction: the staking reward rate minus the token's inflation rate, both from Staking Rewards. Inflation is the dilution tax — new supply printed (or, on capped chains, released on schedule) that shrinks every unstaked holder and claws back part of every staker's reward.
Advertised APY vs. real yield. Reward rates and inflation: Staking Rewards, checked October 29, 2026.
| # | Coin | Advertised APY | Token inflation | Real yield |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ATOM (Cosmos) | 19.67% | 12.68% | 6.99% |
| 2 | ETH (Ethereum) | 7.38% | 2.61% | 4.77% |
| 3 | XTZ (Tezos) | 6.89% | 2.80% | 4.09% |
| 4 | INJ (Injective) | 7.56% | 3.69% | 3.87% |
| 5 | TIA (Celestia) | 5.69% | 2.28% | 3.41% |
| 6 | AVAX (Avalanche) | 5.35% | 2.46% | 2.88% |
| 7 | NEAR (NEAR Protocol) | 4.92% | 2.46% | 2.46% |
| 8 | SEI (Sei) | 4.04% | 1.79% | 2.25% |
| 9 | SOL (Solana) | 4.98% | 3.63% | 1.35% |
| 10 | DOT (Polkadot) | 2.74% | 1.48% | 1.26% |
| 11 | APT (Aptos) | 2.60% | 2.02% | 0.58% |
| 12 | ADA (Cardano) | 2.10% | 1.86% | 0.24% |
| 13 | SUI (Sui) | 1.40% | 2.41% | -1.01% |
| — | POL (Polygon) | 3.15% | not published | not tracked |
Three exhibits. SUI is the only negative on the board: stake it at 1.40% while supply grows 2.41% and you end the year owning a smaller share of the network than you started with — the token count goes up, the ownership goes down. ADA is the quiet one: a 2.10% headline that survives contact with inflation as 0.24% — not a scam, just nearly nothing, wearing a yield costume. And ATOM takes the biggest haircut — 12.68 points of its 19.67% is the network printing the very token it pays you in — yet still lands the best real yield on the board at 6.99%. A huge advertised number isn't automatically bogus. It just isn't the number.
One honest asterisk for Ethereum: its inflation figure is gross issuance before the fee burn, so on heavy-burn periods ETH's real yield is better than the 4.77% shown. POL goes the other way — Staking Rewards publishes no inflation rate for it, so the calculator shows "not tracked" rather than inventing one.
Dividends: the price-decay mirage
On the stock side the trick is the denominator. A fund can lose half its value and its "yield" doubles without a single extra cent being paid. So for the option-income shelf, the yield only means anything next to the price chart. Rough total = the 1-year price change plus the year's distributions measured against the price a year ago — what a buy-and-hold holder actually experienced, approximately.
| Fund | Trailing yield | 1-year price change | Rough 1-year total |
|---|---|---|---|
| MSTY | 139.58% | -60.0% | -4.2% |
| CONY | 126.56% | -64.7% | -20.0% |
| TSLY | 76.03% | -41.1% | +3.7% |
| ULTY | 96.08% | -44.3% | +9.2% |
| YMAX | 59.85% | -33.2% | +6.8% |
| NVDY | 53.97% | -18.8% | +25.0% |
| SPYI | 11.87% | +1.2% | +13.2% |
| QQQI | 14.28% | -1.8% | +12.2% |
| JEPQ | 11.60% | +1.0% | +12.7% |
| JEPI | 7.88% | +0.0% | +7.9% |
MSTY is the purest mirage in finance right now: a 139.58% trailing yield and a rough total of about −4%. The cash that landed in holders' accounts was real; so was the −60% price. CONY managed −20% rough total on a 126.56% yield. Meanwhile the boring end of the same shelf — SPYI, QQQI, JEPQ — kept its price roughly flat and its rough totals positive, because the underlying indexes didn't fall apart. The yield was never the product. The underlying is the product.
Same lesson in a plain mortgage REIT: AGNC's 16.09% yield against a −14.7% price year works out to roughly −1% total. And the year's actual winner in this dataset isn't wearing a yield costume at all: SCHD paid a modest 2.96% while its price rose 29.1%, for a rough total near +32.9%.
Run your own numbers
The Yield Calculator is live on BogusAPY — pick any of the 75, enter an amount, and it shows income per month, the shares or tokens needed for $100 a month at the advertised rate and the real one, and a reinvestment projection that admits up front it assumes the price never moves. Jump straight to the exhibits if you like: MSTY, SUI, ATOM. Data refreshes weekly; when a number moves, the ranking moves.
Check it yourself: links and sources
- Dividend history, prices, 1-year price change: Yahoo Finance (trailing 12 months of actual distributions).
- Staking reward rates, token inflation, staking ratios: Staking Rewards asset pages, checked October 29, 2026.
- Crypto prices: CoinGecko, October 29, 2026.
- The calculator itself: bogusapy.com/p/yield-calculator.html — methodology printed on the page.
Not financial advice.
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