CAFX vs SCHI

CAFXCCongress Intermediate Bond ETF

SCHIASchwab 5-10 Year Corporate Bond ETF

In short

CAFX A boutique manager's active take on the boring middle of the bond market: Congress buys investment-grade paper itself, keeps average maturity inside ten years, and pays out monthly.

SCHI The cheap middle of the corporate bond curve. SCHI holds roughly 2,300 investment-grade corporate bonds maturing in five to ten years, charges three basis points, and pays interest monthly.

Stated mandate

CAFX The Fund seeks to maximize total return through active management of a portfolio invested primarily in debt securities and similar instruments.

SCHI The fund seeks to track, before fees and expenses, an index representing the intermediate-term U.S. corporate bond market.

Why people hold it

• CAFX Actively managed rather than index-tracking: the mandate is to maximize total return from U.S.-dollar investment-grade bonds, benchmarked to the Bloomberg U.S. Intermediate Government/Credit Index.
• The prospectus pins dollar-weighted average maturity to a zero-to-ten-year band, so the interest-rate lane is defined by document, not by manager mood.
• 0.35% a year puts it around the middle of the broad bond-fund pack on cost, unusual for active management, and income lands monthly.

• SCHI 0.03% a year against a 0.19% median for investment-grade corporate bond funds. No peer in the group charges less.
• Follows the Bloomberg US 5-10 Year Corporate Bond Index closely, one of the tightest index implementations among intermediate corporate bond funds.schwabassetmanagement.com
• A multi-billion-dollar fund that trades actively, the kind of scale that usually comes with narrow bid-ask spreads.
• About 2,300 bonds spread across the investment-grade corporate market, with income paid monthly rather than quarterly.

Worth knowing

• CAFX The index heavyweights in this category charge 0.03% (BND, SPAB, SCHZ). Active selection here starts each year with that fee gap behind it.
• Launched in 2024, so the live record is short and the fund still sits in the lower half of a crowded aggregate-bond field.
• Shares trade thinly. Spreads and order type matter more here than with the giant core bond ETFs.

• SCHI Five-to-ten-year maturities carry real rate sensitivity. When yields move, these bonds swing harder than short-term paper and softer than long bonds.
• Corporate credit only. No Treasuries, no mortgages, and nothing outside the five-to-ten-year window, so it's a slice of the bond market rather than the whole thing.schwabassetmanagement.com
• VCIT, IGIB and SPIB run near-identical mandates at similar cost, so the choice often comes down to index details and where you already hold accounts.

Full CAFX profile⁠

Full SCHI profile⁠