After scrambling to account for workers with H-1B visas — such as whether they are currently in the US — companies are relieved that the Trump administration’s pivot to charge $100,000 for applications doesn’t apply to current visa holders.

The White House clarified the changes this week, explaining that the new, dramatically higher fee will go into effect next year. Before that, companies were bracing for the worst — JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told the media that the change caught them off guard. Visas are critical for firms, like JPMorgan Chase, that move many workers around the globe, he noted. The fee change is expected to steeply reduce the number of applications for H-1B visas, the charges for which are currently just $215, not including legal costs and other fees. Companies will likely reserve applications in the lottery-style system for highly skilled, highly compensated workers. Only as many as 85,000 H-1B visas are approved per year.

“Imposing new H-1B fees will have a significant financial impact on asset management firms. Firms like Fidelity employed nearly 1,800 H-1B workers from 2022 to 2024,” Nicole Gunara, principal immigration attorney at Manifest Law, said in a statement. “At a projected cost of about $100,000 per worker over three years, these requirements translate into over $180 million dollars in additional cost for these companies.”

Power Users

The firms with the highest numbers of approved H-1B visas are in the tech sector, but financial services, including major asset managers, also benefit extensively from the program. Goldman Sachs, for example, has more than 1,000 H-1B visas approved for workers in fiscal 2025, government data show. And it’s likely that the companies with the deepest pockets will be able to handle the costs, with the forthcoming fee being a roadblock to smaller and midsize firms, lawyers told ETF Upside.

“Across the financial services industry, hiring will be more selective in regards to which roles get H-1B filings,” said Michelle Abeckjerr, managing partner at Abjeckjerr Immigration Law. Applications “will likely be limited to only senior, high value or hard-to-fill technical or quantitative roles that justify the cost.” It’s unclear how the positions break down, as the data readily available from the government are high level. Global asset managers often seek regional expertise for investment strategies, for example, but many of the jobs are tech-related.

Some of the other H-1B power users include:

• Bank of America, with 492 approved applications for fiscal 2025
• Morgan Stanley, with 447
• Charles Schwab, with 395

Small Companies, Bigger Problems: Multinational firms often bring workers with specific expertise to the US for long periods of time, Envision Financial Systems COO Brian Jones said in a statement. “The new requirements may make it more difficult and costly for multi-national firms to execute their business model,” he said. Still, regulations — and big changes to them — are nothing new for financial services, said Mario Favetta, relationship manager at Fuse Research Network. “This change that will likely affect future hiring practices is just another change, and I’m confident that the industry as a whole is going to be able to adapt.”

How much yield could YieldMax max if YieldMax … you know the rest.

The exchange-traded fund issuer YieldMax has attracted investors with impressive yields (sometimes cited as over 51% “distribution rates”), and gobbled up an impressive $22 billion in net inflows since 2022, according to a recent Morningstar blog post. But analyst and author of the post Jeffrey Ptak said there’s quite a bit of nuance to sift through first. “I don’t know what investors think they’re getting, though it stands to reason they expect to receive large distributions of income and gains — i.e. yield — which is not what’s been delivered for the most part,” Ptak told Advisor Upside.

Flip a COIN

The post points to an interesting data point: On average investors in YieldMax ETFs lost some 11% per year since late 2022 assuming they reinvested 80% of the distributions they received, Ptak found. One fund in particular — the COIN Option Income Strategy ETF (CONY) — hit annual returns of 42% between its inception in August 2023 and April 2025. However, in that same time, investors lost $35.5 million, according to the Morningstar analysis. CONY’s massive distributions look enticing on paper, but may come with a caveat:

• From inception through July 2025, the fund made 23 distributions totalling $1.3 billion. The average monthly distribution was 8% of the fund’s assets, according to the Morningstar blog post.
• But the bulk of that was capital returned to investors, not income made on their investments. So that means roughly 83 cents of every dollar the ETF distributed was return of capital.

To be fair, some of CONY’s losses are chalked up to poor timing by investors, per the analysis. That roughly two-year stretch from the inception of the fund included multiple instances where investors piled hundreds of millions of dollars into CONY right after strong gains, but also right before downturns.

“My fiduciary responsibility is to investors, not day traders, any more than Jensen Huang has no responsibility to people who day trade Nvidia,” said YieldMax strategist Michael Khouw, adding that investors who reinvested dividends back into the fund would be up 130.5% since debut. He also said those distributions made sense for investors because they won’t owe taxes right away on return of capital.

Yield the Floor. However, Ptak said investors may not know the difference and that the company’s advertised “distribution rates” on its website can consist of both income and return of capital. “This is the ‘yield’ in ‘YieldMax,’” Ptak said. “Given those distribution rates aren’t sustainable from income generation or realization of gains, yes I think it’s misleading.”

ETFs may have conquered Wall Street, but the industry still has work to do courting older investors.

A new study from London-based Investment Association on ETF adoption in the UK highlights a trend both here and abroad that ETF adoption is skewing younger. Nearly half of UK investors started investing in ETFs within the past five years, and two in five ETF investors are younger than 34. In the US, it’s estimated that three in four people aged 18 to 25 now hold ETFs in their retirement accounts compared to just 60% of Baby Boomers, according to a Nasdaq survey. Older investors, some of whom may have started investing before the rise of ETFs, could prove an untapped market for issuers.

“There’s work to do in those particular segments that are not well represented,” said Investment Association market insight director Miranda Seath. “It’s really about basic education: what ETFs are, how they can be used, what might some of the advantages be — but also educating people on risks so that they get a good picture.”

ETF Pluribus Unum

The generational gap in ETF uptake may come down to a lack of awareness. Nearly half of all the trades that advisors made for Gen Zers last year were in the form of ETFs, according to the Nasdaq data. “When we do see differences, it’s often in the demographic data about different generations. Gen Z versus Baby Boomers can have some quite different views,” Seath said. “As younger people use [ETFs] and become more used to using them, as data shows… The next generation of investors is going to be really critical.”

The Investment Association data also found that:

• 49% of UK retail investors had little to no knowledge of ETFs.
• 55% of UK investors getting financial advice have either never been recommended an ETF or weren’t sure.

City Life. ETF buyers are also more common in cities, where economic opportunities and money tend to be concentrated, according to the report. For example, a quarter of the ETF investors surveyed lived in London. Investors’ goals, however, cross geographic and demographic lines, Seath said. “Pretty much universally… key goals are things like saving and investing for retirement, those really important life milestones,” she said. “This is not just a product for people who are comfortable with trading and like to trade.”