EVHY vs HYLB

EVHYBEaton Vance High Yield ETF

HYLBAXtrackers USD High Yield Corporate Bond ETF

In short

EVHY A credit picker's junk bond fund. Eaton Vance's leveraged-credit desk builds the portfolio by hand, the prospectus caps the deepest-distress tier at 10% of net assets, and income goes out monthly. Trading since 2023.

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

EVHY The fund seeks a high level of current income and also pursues growth of income and capital.

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

• EVHY Active, but with guardrails written into the prospectus: at least 80% of net assets in high yield, and no more than 10% in bonds rated below B3/B-.eatonvance.com
• Up to 15% of net assets can sit in investment-grade bonds, giving the managers a quality lever most index trackers in this cohort do not have.eatonvance.com
• Pays monthly, and the portfolio has hewed closely to its stated high-yield income mandate rather than drifting.

• 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

• EVHY At 0.48% a year it costs more than the high yield median, and far more than index rivals like SCYB (0.03%), SPHY (0.05%) and USHY (0.08%). You are paying for the stock-picking.
• Small asset base and light trading volume, so bid-ask spreads can run wider than the giant index funds in this category.
• Below-investment-grade bonds carry real default and liquidity risk, and this fund only launched in 2023, so its record is short.

• 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 EVHY profile⁠

Full HYLB profile⁠