Direxion Heads in a New Direction With Income ETFs

Who doesn’t like getting paid?

Derivative income is one of the hottest areas for new ETFs, and while no one is likely to knock JPMorgan off its pedestal anytime soon, other asset managers still want what pieces of the market they can get. One firm fashionably late to the party, Direxion, recently prepped a line of single-stock, option-income funds, dubbed Income Boost, that will probably launch over the summer. That represents a new category for the company, which specializes in leveraged and inverse ETFs (only two of its 131 ETFs are neither leveraged nor inverse). The nine funds use option premiums to generate income and focus on Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Micron Technology, Nvidia, Palantir and Tesla. 

Perhaps the Mag 7 should be revised as the Notable 9 … Although that doesn’t have much of a ring to it. Let’s call it a work in progress?

Follow the Money

It makes sense that asset managers want to expand into the category. Derivative income has been one of the fastest-growing areas in ETFs, bringing in $17 billion in the first three months of 2026 and nearly $58 billion over 12 months, data from Morningstar Direct show. Its sales growth rate of over 50% is the biggest among the top-10-selling ETF categories this year. “It is clear that ETF issuers have identified options trading and covered call strategies as a focus for product development,” said Kevin Lyons, senior analyst of product development at Cerulli Associates. 

Survey data from the firm supports that:

• Over half, 56%, of ETF issuers surveyed last year by Cerulli said that options-trading strategies were either a primary or secondary focus for product development.
• Further, 36% pointed to defined-outcome products as an area with unmet demand, with fixed-income strategies being the only category with higher potential.

Need Proof? JPMorgan’s $45 billion Equity Premium Income ETF (JEPI) raked in $1.3 billion in March, bringing its total year-to-date haul to $2.8 billion and its 12-month net inflows to $4.8 billion. And that’s just half the demand of its cousin, the $36 billion JPMorgan Nasdaq Equity Premium Income ETF (JEPQ), which pulled in $9.8 billion over 12 months and $3.3 billion in the first three months of 2026, per data from Morningstar Direct. 

That tracks with figures from data and benchmarking firm Hearts & Wallets, which found that people who own ETFs are more likely than others to want to earn income. Among those investors, 60% said they have a goal of generating income from their investments, compared with 26% for those who don’t dabble in ETFs. Whether they want to get paid by single-stock ETFs is a separate matter, but Direxion is among those betting that more than a few do.