AOHY vs HYLB

AOHYCAngel Oak High Yield Opportunities ETF

HYLBAXtrackers USD High Yield Corporate Bond ETF

In short

AOHY An actively managed junk-bond fund in an aisle stacked with ultra-cheap index trackers. The mandate is income first, capital appreciation second, and the cash goes out monthly.

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

AOHY The fund seeks a high level of current income and, secondarily, capital appreciation.

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

• AOHY Income is the job, not a byproduct: the fund seeks a high level of current income, with capital appreciation named only as a secondary goal.
• Distributions land monthly rather than quarterly, which lines up with how most people actually pay bills.
• The strategy predates the wrapper: this objective traces to a prospectus filed years before the ETF itself launched in 2024.
• Plain 1940 Act fund structure, and our review turned up no structural quirks to work around.

• 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

• AOHY At 0.55% a year it sits above the 0.40% cohort median, and index rivals like SCYB (0.03%) and USHY (0.08%) charge a sliver of that. The premium buys the active call.
• It trades lightly next to the cohort's index heavyweights, so limit orders matter more here than with the big passive names.
• A 2024 launch means a short record, and on our overall read it lands in the lower half of the high yield group.

• 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 AOHY profile⁠

Full HYLB profile⁠