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It is a Canadian exchange-traded fund that holds a basket of high-dividend stocks and uses covered call options to turn that portfolio into monthly cash income for investors.
Harvest Diversified High Income Shares ETF is not a normal company that sells products or services. It is a fund, a big pooled pot of money that invests in the shares of other companies on behalf of the people who buy into it. It trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange, so anyone with a brokerage account can buy or sell units during the trading day just like a stock.
What it mainly owns is a diversified basket of large, established dividend-paying companies, mostly Canadian banks, utilities, telecoms, pipelines and insurers, plus some other income-producing names. The fund's job is to squeeze as much cash out of that basket as it can and pay it out to unit holders every month. It does that in two ways: it collects the ordinary dividends those companies pay, and it runs a covered call strategy on top. A covered call is worth understanding, because it is the engine here. The fund already owns the shares, so it sells other investors the right to buy those shares from it at a set price by a set date. For that right, the fund gets paid a fee upfront — the "premium." If the shares stay below that price, the fund keeps the premium and the shares, pure extra income. If the shares jump above it, the fund may have to hand over the shares at the agreed price, capping its upside. So the trade-off is simple: the fund gives up some of the big rallies in exchange for steady cash. In a flat or gently rising market, that is a great deal. In a roaring bull market, it lags. The reason people buy it is the monthly distribution — the fund is built for retirees and income-focused investors who want cash in hand rather than slow price appreciation. The catch is real and worth stating plainly: some of that monthly payout can come from the fund's own capital rather than pure investment earnings, and covered call funds generally cap their gains while still carrying full downside if the stocks fall. It is a tool for income, not a free lunch.
In 2024, Harvest launched a set of unusual ETFs. Each one owned a single big company's stock and sold covered calls against it — essentially renting out the chance for extra gains in exchange for cash income every month. That gave investors high monthly payouts plus some long-term growth, and it set the stage for something bigger: bundling many of these single-stock funds into one diversified package.
That bundle became HHIS, which began trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange in January 2025 under Harvest Portfolios Group of Oakville, Ontario. It held a mix of Harvest's single-stock ETFs covering giants like Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, Eli Lilly, Meta, Tesla and Palantir, each one generating income through covered calls. The first monthly distribution came in at 25 cents per unit.
Starting in spring 2025, the funds underneath HHIS began borrowing modestly — about a fifth to a quarter of their value — to buy more stock. That extra exposure pushed the yield to roughly 28 to 29 percent, which is the whole point of a fund like this. But borrowing cuts both ways: it also made the ride bumpier and the losses deeper when stocks fell.
In October 2025, Harvest added a U.S.-dollar version of HHIS on the same exchange, so investors could buy it without currency conversion. It also lifted the cap of 15 underlying ETFs, opening the door to more of its single-stock funds. New ones tracking Circle, Reddit, Robinhood and SoFi were expected to join the portfolio within weeks.
Investors clearly liked the pitch. Within a year of launch, HHIS passed 1.3 billion dollars in assets, and Harvest raised the monthly payout twice — to 26 cents in October and 27 cents in November — for a current yield near 29 percent. The portfolio grew to 20 holdings, with CrowdStrike recently added, while the managers kept adjusting the weights.
By the end of April 2026, the fund held over 1.55 billion dollars across 21 investments, with technology making up nearly half the portfolio. Someone who put in 1,000 dollars at the start would have had about 1,271 dollars — roughly 20 percent a year compounded. For a fund built on covered calls and borrowed money, that is the payoff the whole story was aiming at.
The fund is managed by Harvest Portfolios Group, a Canadian asset manager based in Oakville, Ontario, that specializes in these kinds of income and option-writing ETFs. It sits in a crowded field — rival Canadian covered call and high-income ETFs from firms like Purpose Investments and Hamilton ETFs compete for the same income-hungry investors, so cost, distribution rate and the quality of the underlying basket are what separate them.
Saved answer · last researched 6 Nov 2026