I was looking at this less as a yield comparison and more as a portfolio-role question.
If VOO is already the long-term market exposure in a portfolio, then adding JEPI, SPYI, or another income-oriented S&P 500 fund only makes sense if the income role is clear enough to justify the tradeoff. I do not want to treat every higher-yield fund as automatically useful just because it pays more.
One issue with the original Reddit post is that the title mentions SPYI, but the visible table shows SPY. I am using the visible table data here, so this comparison is based on VOO, JEPI, and SPY. The broader screening question still applies: when does an income sleeve deserve space next to a core growth position?
What I was trying to figure out
The simple version of the question is not “which fund is better?” It is “what job should each holding do?”
For me, VOO is easier to understand as a growth engine. In this snapshot, it has 1.08% TTM yield, 20.02% Price CAGR, a +20.6% return gap, Low payout support risk, and Low stability. That combination fits the role of a broad-market growth position more than an income position.
JEPI is the opposite kind of tradeoff. Its TTM yield is much higher at 8.29%, but its Price CAGR is only 1.30%, with a +1.2% return gap, Low payout support risk, and Medium stability. That does not make JEPI bad; it means I should not pretend it is doing the same job as VOO. The income is the reason to consider it, but the lower price-growth profile is the cost I need to be honest about.
SPY looks very close to VOO in the visible data. SPY has 1.03% TTM yield, 20.00% Price CAGR, and a +20.5% return gap, compared with VOO at 1.08% TTM yield, 20.02% Price CAGR, and a +20.6% return gap. From this table alone, I would not treat SPY as a meaningfully different role from VOO. It is mostly another broad-market exposure.
The payout support risk label is not where the main difference shows up here. All three funds are marked Low for payout support risk. The more useful difference is the combination of income and price behavior: JEPI shows 8.29% TTM yield with 1.30% Price CAGR, while VOO shows 1.08% TTM yield with 20.02% Price CAGR.
Stability is another part I would watch, but not as a standalone answer. JEPI is marked Medium stability, while VOO and SPY are both marked Low. For this kind of comparison, I would read that as another reason to define JEPI as an income sleeve, not as a replacement for the core market exposure.
My current takeaway is that VOO, JEPI, and SPY can sit in different roles only if the role is explicit. VOO is the growth engine. JEPI may be an income sleeve. SPY, based on the visible data here, overlaps heavily with VOO. So this type of comparison helps answer the “growth versus income” question, but it does not solve portfolio diversification by itself.
That is the part I care about in screening: not whether the yield is higher, but whether the fund actually gives the portfolio a job that is different enough to deserve the space.
Note: Metrics are exported from Dividend Decoder as a partial snapshot; not investment advice.