HYHG vs HYLB

HYHGDProShares High Yield - Interest Rate Hedged

HYLBAXtrackers USD High Yield Corporate Bond ETF

In short

HYHG Most junk-bond ETFs hand you two risks: credit and interest rates. HYHG keeps the credit and shorts Treasury futures to target a duration of zero. A rare build, running since 2013, in a cohort of plain-vanilla high-yield trackers.

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

HYHG HYHG seeks to track the FTSE High Yield (Treasury Rate-Hedged) Index before fees and expenses. Its strategy combines high-yield corporate-bond exposure with short U.S. Treasury futures intended to reduce Treasury interest-rate sensitivity.

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

• HYHG The hedge is built in: short Treasury futures against the bond sleeve, targeting a duration of zero, so results lean on coupons and credit spreads rather than the Treasury curve.proshares.com
• No two-ticket assembly. You get high-yield exposure and the rate hedge in one wrapper, instead of pairing a junk-bond fund with your own short-Treasury position.proshares.com
• Live since 2013, so there is more than a decade of real-world history across rising and falling rate regimes. Holds roughly 230 bonds and pays monthly.
• Tracks the FTSE High Yield (Treasury Rate-Hedged) Index, a published rulebook rather than a manager's discretion.

• 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

• HYHG The hedge costs: 0.50% a year, above the typical high-yield ETF, while broad rivals like SCYB (0.03%) and SPHY (0.05%) charge a sliver of that.
• It hedges Treasury rates, not credit. Defaults and widening spreads still bite, and when yields fall the short futures leg works against the bonds.proshares.com
• A smaller, more thinly traded fund than the giants of the category, so spreads and order type matter more at the point of entry.

• 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 HYHG profile⁠

Full HYLB profile⁠