ANGL vs HYLB

ANGLBVanEck Fallen Angel High Yield Bond ETF

HYLBAXtrackers USD High Yield Corporate Bond ETF

In short

ANGL Junk bonds with a pedigree. ANGL holds US dollar corporate bonds that were investment grade at issue and got downgraded later, a rules-based slice of high yield running since 2012 at a quarter-percent fee.

HYLB Broad-market junk bonds at index-fund pricing: 0.05% a year, a fraction of what the typical high-yield bond ETF charges, spread across roughly 1,300 issues. Running since 2016, it pays monthly.

Stated mandate

ANGL The fund seeks to track the price and yield performance of an index of U.S.-dollar corporate bonds that were investment grade when issued but later became below investment grade.

HYLB The fund seeks to track, before fees and expenses, the Solactive USD High Yield Corporates Total Market Index. It uses a passive representative-sampling indexing approach.

Why people hold it

• ANGL Owns bonds that were investment grade when issued and later fell below it, so the portfolio is the demoted crowd rather than debt born as junk.
• Costs 0.25% a year, well under the 0.40% median for high-yield bond ETFs.
• Tracks its ICE fallen angel index closely, trades actively, and pays monthly.
• Live since 2012 and now a multi-billion-dollar fund, giving the strategy a long real-world record instead of a backtest.

• HYLB 0.05% expense ratio puts it at the low end of the high-yield ETF field, matching SPHY and undercutting USHY's 0.08%. Fee drag matters most where yield is the whole point.
• Total-market mandate, not a filtered slice: roughly 1,300 bonds sampled from the Solactive USD High Yield Corporates Total Market Index.
• Tracking has been tight against its stated index, and it trades actively enough to keep spreads workable. One of the cleaner implementations in the high-yield group.
• Monthly distributions, with a live record going back to a 2016 launch (through the 2020 credit shock and the 2022 rate spike).

Worth knowing

• ANGL A narrow corner of high yield, roughly 130 bonds, so one wave of downgrades can tilt the mix toward a single sector or issuer.
• Broad high-yield beta is cheaper: SCYB, SPHY and USHY all charge under a tenth of a percent.
• Everything inside is below investment grade, so prices react to default worries and interest rate moves.

• HYLB This is the credit-risk end of the bond market. Below-investment-grade issuers default more often, and prices can fall hard when spreads widen.
• Representative sampling means it holds a subset of the index, not every bond, so results can drift slightly from the benchmark.
• Cheap, but not the floor: SCYB runs 0.03%. HYLB is also a mid-sized fund next to the largest names in the category.

Full ANGL profile⁠

Full HYLB profile⁠