GHYB vs HYLB

GHYBAGoldman Sachs Access High Yield Corporate Bond ETF

HYLBAXtrackers USD High Yield Corporate Bond ETF

In short

GHYB Most cheap high-yield ETFs just buy the whole junk-bond market. GHYB tracks an index Goldman co-designed with FTSE that screens the universe first, and charges well under the typical high-yield ETF.

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

GHYB The Fund seeks to track, before fees and expenses, the Citi Goldman Sachs High Yield Corporate Bond Index, which measures U.S.-dollar-denominated high-yield corporate bonds.

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

• GHYB 0.15% a year against a roughly 0.40% median for high-yield bond ETFs. In a coupon-driven asset, fee drag comes straight out of the income.
• The screened index is the point: a rules-based cut of the broad FTSE high-yield market, built with Goldman, not a plain market-cap sweep.gs.com
• Tracks its index very tightly, with roughly 600 bonds and monthly distributions doing the work.
• One of the stronger builds in a crowded high-yield field, and it has been running since 2017.

• 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

• GHYB Thinly traded and modest in size next to the category giants, which usually shows up as wider bid-ask spreads.
• SCYB, SPHY and USHY charge less for full-market high-yield exposure. Here you pay a bit more for the screen.
• Screens do not remove credit risk. This is below-investment-grade corporate debt and it moves with the credit cycle.

• 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 GHYB profile⁠

Full HYLB profile⁠