EUHY vs HYLB

EUHYBiShares Euro High Yield Corporate Bond USD Hedged ETF

HYLBAXtrackers USD High Yield Corporate Bond ETF

In short

EUHY US junk-bond ETFs are everywhere. EUHY goes the other direction: euro-denominated European high yield, with the euro exposure hedged back to dollars. European credit risk, without the currency ride.

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

EUHY The fund seeks to track USD-hedged, euro-denominated high-yield bonds, providing euro high-yield exposure while reducing euro-to-dollar currency fluctuations.

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

• EUHY Tracks the Bloomberg Pan-European High Yield (Euro) 100% Hedged to USD Index, so you hold European credit spreads with euro-to-dollar swings hedged out.
• Costs 0.35% a year, below the 0.40% median for high-yield bond ETFs.
• Spread across roughly 700 bonds, so no single issuer carries the fund.
• Trading since 2012 inside BlackRock's iShares lineup, a long run for such a narrow corner of the bond market.

• 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

• EUHY Thinly traded. Bid-ask spreads can run wider and larger orders move the price more than in the household-name high-yield funds.
• Cheap for its cohort, not for high yield generally: US-focused funds like SCYB and SPHY charge a fraction. The European mandate and the hedge cost extra.
• The hedge cuts both ways, stripping out euro gains as well as euro losses, and payouts land on an irregular schedule rather than a fixed monthly rhythm.

• 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 EUHY profile⁠

Full HYLB profile⁠