This Robinhood Stock Has a Trailing 48% Dividend Yield. Is It Too Good to Be True?

2026-02-06 05:30:00 ET

The popular online brokerage Robinhood offers several filters for investors looking for interesting stocks, including one for dividend yield, which compares a company's annual dividend to its share price. This essentially tells investors how much they will earn in dividends based on how much they pay for a share. If an investor buys one share for $100 that pays an annual dividend of $3, the dividend yield is 3%.

One of the highest dividend yields on Robinhood's screener was for a closed-end investment company called Oxford Lane Capital (NASDAQ: OXLC), which has a trailing-12-month dividend yield of about 48%, an astounding figure well above the norm. Is a dividend yield like this simply too good to be true?

If you follow markets, then you've probably heard about private credit. After the Great Recession of 2007-2009, lawmakers passed sweeping bank regulations to make the banking system safer and less vulnerable to another meltdown. Although the regulation succeeded on this front, further regulation also stymied bank lending, which opened the world to private credit.

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