DYLD vs HYLB

DYLDDLeaderShares Dynamic Yield ETF

HYLBAXtrackers USD High Yield Corporate Bond ETF

In short

DYLD A go-anywhere income fund in a corner of the market ruled by index trackers. No benchmark to hug: the manager can move across corporate bonds, bank loans, securitized paper and sovereigns in pursuit of current income, and pays 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

DYLD The Fund seeks current income.

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

• DYLD No index to hug. The mandate lets it roam corporate bonds, Treasuries and agencies, bank loans, convertibles, asset-backed and mortgage-backed paper, foreign sovereigns and private debt.sec.govsec.gov 2
• One job, stated plainly: current income. Net investment income goes out monthly, with realized capital gains typically distributed once a year in December.
• At least 80% of assets stay in a diversified pool of fixed income instruments, so the flexibility works inside a defined bond sandbox rather than drifting somewhere else entirely.sec.gov
• Ordinary 1940 Act fund structure: exchange-traded shares, 1099 tax reporting rather than a K-1.

• 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

• DYLD 0.75% a year is the toll for the active mandate. The index-tracking core bond funds at the top of this group, BND and SPAB among them, charge a small fraction of that.
• Small asset base and thin trading, so spreads can run wider than in the giant core bond ETFs. Order size and timing matter more here.
• In a crowded aggregate-bond field, it sits in the lower ranks, where cheap, broad index trackers set the bar.

• 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 DYLD profile⁠

Full HYLB profile⁠