Long term performance and yield are both very strong, in excess of 9%. No covered calls but does have some leverage. Not sure how they achieve 9%+ yield without covered calls but the yield seems consistent and large portion of distribution is capital gains, eligible dividends and ROC.
Never invested in a closed end fund before. What is the difference between this and an ETF?
The main difference is that closed end funds only issue shares upon a prospectus offering/bought deal, and unit prices vary with supply/demand from existing investors. With an ETF, new units can be created/cancelled with buy/sell orders, so an ETF is more likely to trade much closer to net asset value, whereas a closed-end fund can trade at a premium or discount to NAV depending on demand (discounts are far more common). EIT currently trades at a 3.2% discount to NAV. Its five year annualized return is a decent 13.2%. The higher yield comes from the leverage. It tends to weight certain sectors, and thus performance can be volatile but to be fair it has only lost money once (2018, minus 3.05%) in the past decade. Its high weighting (20% today) in energy helped it to a 10.5% gain last year. As with many closed end funds, it likes to issue new units (for more fees) as often as it can, so we would not really expect it to ever trade at a premium. We didn't like it much in the early 2000s to 2010 but management changed and they have done a good job with sector and securities selection since then. We would consider it decent, with some drawbacks (high fees, particularly).