HYGH vs HYLB

HYGHBiShares Interest Rate Hedged High Yield Bond ETF

HYLBAXtrackers USD High Yield Corporate Bond ETF

In short

HYGH High yield income with the rate risk engineered out: it owns iShares' flagship junk bond ETF and layers short interest rate swaps on top, leaving credit spreads as the main driver. A pure spread play, running since 2014.

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

HYGH The Fund seeks to track an index combining high-yield corporate-bond exposure with interest-rate hedges intended to reduce sensitivity to rising rates.

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

• HYGH Owns iShares' flagship high yield corporate bond ETF and layers short interest rate swaps on top, rebalanced daily, so Treasury yield moves are largely netted out.ishares.comishares.com 2
• The index uses up to 10 swap contracts across different maturities, designed to benefit when the floating reference rate rises above the fixed rate paid.sec.govishares.com
• Trading since May 2014, so there is a decade-plus of live history behind the mechanism, and it pays monthly.

• 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

• HYGH Costs 0.52% net of a waiver through February 28, 2027 (1.12% gross), above the category median; plain trackers like SCYB at 0.03% and SPHY at 0.05% keep full duration.
• The hedge targets rates, not credit. Defaults and spread widening in below investment grade bonds still flow straight through.ishares.com
• Income nets the underlying fund's yield against fees and the cost of carry on the hedges, so the payout can differ from unhedged high yield.ishares.com

• 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 HYGH profile⁠

Full HYLB profile⁠