FSIG vs VTC

FSIGCFirst Trust Limited Duration Investment Grade Corporate ETF

VTCAVanguard Total Corporate Bond ETF

In short

FSIG First Trust's short-end corporate bond fund: roughly 300 investment-grade credits, monthly income, and a mandate built around current income rather than an index. The trade-off is a 0.44% fee in a pennies-a-year category.

VTC Most cheap corporate bond funds sell you one slice of the maturity curve. VTC buys the whole investment-grade corporate market, short to long, for 0.03% a year, and since 2025 it owns the bonds directly instead of stacking three Vanguard funds.

Stated mandate

FSIG The Fund seeks current income by investing at least 80% of its net assets in investment-grade corporate debt securities under normal market conditions.

VTC The Fund seeks to track a broad, market-weighted corporate bond index, specifically the Bloomberg U.S. Corporate Bond Index. It uses an indexing approach focused on investment-grade, fixed-rate, taxable corporate bonds.

Why people hold it

• FSIG Limited duration by design: shorter-maturity corporate paper mechanically swings less on a given move in rates than long bonds do.
• At least 80% of net assets sit in investment-grade corporate debt, spread across roughly 300 positions, so no single borrower drives the outcome.
• The objective is written around income, not index replication, so the managers pick issuers and maturities instead of copying a benchmark.
• Income arrives monthly, and the fund has grown past the billion-dollar mark since its 2021 launch.

• VTC 0.03% a year against a 0.19% median for investment-grade corporate ETFs. On this exact Bloomberg index, nothing in the group charges less.
• One ticker, the full corporate curve. Top-graded rivals like VCIT, IGIB and IGSB each buy a single maturity band; VTC's index spans short, intermediate and long fixed-rate corporates.
• No overlays, no active tilts, no credit guesswork. Market-weighted indexing of investment-grade, fixed-rate, taxable corporates, and the portfolio hews tightly to that mandate.
• Income lands monthly, not quarterly, which matters if bond coupons are doing real work in your cash flow.

Worth knowing

• FSIG Costs 0.44% a year against a 0.19% category median, while index rivals like VCIT and IGSB run 0.03% to 0.04%.
• Corporate credit, not Treasuries: prices move with issuer creditworthiness as well as with interest rates.
• Trading is moderate rather than heavy, so bid-ask spreads can widen when markets get jumpy.

• VTC Whole-curve means long bonds in the mix, so prices move more with interest rates than a 1-5 year slice like IGSB does.
• The plumbing changed in March 2025: Vanguard moved it from holding three underlying corporate bond ETFs to buying the index bonds directly. Same objective, same index.sec.gov
• Moderately traded rather than a volume heavyweight, so spreads can run wider than the busiest corporate bond funds, particularly in choppy markets.

Full FSIG profile⁠

Full VTC profile⁠