FLRT vs FTSL

FLRTCPacer Aristotle Pacific Floating Rate High Income ETF

FTSLCFirst Trust Senior Loan Fund

In short

FLRT A bank-loan specialist parked in a high-yield crowd. FLRT buys floating-rate debt from below-investment-grade borrowers, so coupons reset with short-term rates instead of sitting fixed, and a credit sub-adviser picks the paper. Running since 2015.

FTSL Most funds in the high-yield aisle own fixed-coupon junk bonds. FTSL owns first-lien senior bank loans whose coupons float with short-term rates, chosen by a live credit team instead of an index rulebook, with income paid monthly.

Stated mandate

FLRT The fund seeks high current income by investing mainly in floating-rate loans issued by non-investment-grade companies; this exposure may also help hedge rising interest rates.

FTSL The fund seeks high current income and secondarily aims to preserve capital. It normally invests at least 80% of net assets in first-lien senior floating-rate bank loans, primarily to North American businesses.

Why people hold it

• FLRT Floating-rate coupons reset with short-term rates, which is why Pacer frames the portfolio as an income source that can also hedge rising rates rather than a long-duration bond bet.paceretfs.com
• Real loan-market pedigree behind the wheel: Aristotle Pacific Capital, formerly Pacific Asset Management, sub-advises and assembles a few hundred positions credit by credit.paceretfs.com
• Income arrives monthly, not quarterly.
• Not a freshly minted launch: the strategy has traded since 2015 and survived a fund reorganization along the way.paceretfs.com

• FTSL First-lien senior floating-rate bank loans: the coupons reset with short-term rates, and the debt sits at the top of the borrower's capital structure.ftportfolios.com
• Actively managed, so a credit team picks the loans rather than following a bank-loan index, spread across roughly 220 positions.
• Trading since 2013 and now a multi-billion-dollar fund that pays monthly, with a track record spanning both rate hikes and cuts.
• The stated mission is plain: high current income first, capital preservation second. A different job than chasing total return.

Worth knowing

• FLRT Active pricing: 0.60% a year, above the roughly 0.40% typical of high-yield ETFs, and index rivals such as SCYB and SPHY charge a small fraction of that.
• The S&P/LSTA Leveraged Loan 100 is the yardstick, not the blueprint. Holdings are chosen actively, so the portfolio can look quite different from the loan market it gets measured against.paceretfs.com
• The prospectus flags liquidity, CLO and asset-backed risks alongside high-yield credit risk. Loan paper can get harder to move when markets tighten up.paceretfs.com

• FTSL At 0.70% a year it sits above the group's roughly 0.40% median and multiples of index rivals like SCYB and SPHY, putting it near the back of its high-yield peer group on cost.
• Floating coupons cut both ways: monthly income follows short-term rates up, and follows them back down.
• These are leveraged corporate loans, so borrower defaults, not interest-rate swings, do most of the damage to capital here.ftportfolios.com

Full FLRT profile⁠

Full FTSL profile⁠