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system
how some mutual funds pay such high dividends
user
look at their dividend history.  the chart there is simply reporting the most recent dividend (or a recent time period, in any event).  gf for example: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/gf/dividend-history it's had basically two significant dividends and a bunch of small dividends.  past performance is not indicative of future returns and all that.  it might never have a similar dividend again. what you're basically looking at with that chart is a list of recently well-performing funds - funds who had a good year.  they obviously may or may not have such a good year next year. you also have funds that are dividend-heavy (intended explicitly to return significant dividends).  those may return large dividends, but could still fall in value significantly.  look at acp for example: it's currently trading near it's 2-year low.  you got a nice dividend, but the price dropped quite a bit, so you lost a chunk of that money.  (i don't know if acp is a dividend-heavy fund, but it looks like it might be.) gf's chart is also indicative of something interesting: it fell off a cliff right after it gave its dividend (at the end of the year).  dropped $4.  i think that's because this is a mutual fund priced based on the nav of its holdings - so it dividended some of those holdings, which dropped the share price (and the nav of the fund) by that amount.  ie, $18 a share, $4 a share dividend, so after that $14 a share.  (the rest of the dividends are from stock holdings which pay dividends themselves, if i understand properly).  has a similar drop in dec 2013.  they may simply be trying to keep the price of the fund in the ~$15 a share range; i suspect (but don't know) that some funds have in their charter a requirement to stay in a particular range and dividend excess value.
assistant