HYGV vs HYLB

HYGVANorthern Trust High Yield Value-Scored Bond ETF

HYLBAXtrackers USD High Yield Corporate Bond ETF

In short

HYGV Most high-yield ETFs buy the junk market by size. HYGV starts from the same universe, then reweights it toward Northern Trust's value score, with credit and liquidity screens on top. The quant tilt in a category built on plain beta.

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

HYGV The Fund seeks to track, before fees and expenses, the price and yield performance of the Northern Trust High Yield Value-Scored US Corporate Bond Index.

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

• HYGV The index maximizes exposure to Northern Trust's proprietary value score, drops bonds in the lowest decile of its credit score, and screens out the thinnest new issues.sec.govflexshares.com
• Guardrails on the tilt: any issuer capped at 5% of the index, sector weights within 8 points of the parent index, duration kept similar, spread over roughly 1,000 bonds.sec.gov
• Plain index-fund plumbing: a 1940 Act ETF that has stayed close to the benchmark it advertises, pays monthly, and is one of the stronger implementations in its peer group.

• 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

• HYGV Fee is 0.37% net of a waiver through March 1, 2027 (0.38% gross). That sits near the category median, but above cap-weighted trackers like SCYB at 0.03% or USHY at 0.08%.
• The index is built to carry more yield than the broad high-yield market, and those bonds are speculative: issuer defaults and sharp price moves come with the territory.sec.gov
• It reweights the market rather than mirroring it, so results can drift from plain cap-weighted high-yield indexes in either direction.sec.gov

• 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 HYGV profile⁠

Full HYLB profile⁠