HYLB vs NUHY

HYLBAXtrackers USD High Yield Corporate Bond ETF

NUHYBNuveen ESG High Yield Corporate Bond

In short

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.

NUHY High yield with a conscience filter. NUHY tracks a Bloomberg MSCI index that screens junk-bond issuers on ESG data and leans toward the market's more tradable corners, at a fee below what the typical high-yield ETF charges.

Stated mandate

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.

NUHY The Fund seeks to track, before fees and expenses, the investment results of the Bloomberg MSCI U.S. High Yield Very Liquid ESG Select Index.

Why people hold it

• 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).

• NUHY Costs 0.30% a year, under the 0.40% median for high-yield bond ETFs.
• The ESG screen is written into the mandate, not bolted on: the fund's stated job is tracking the Bloomberg MSCI U.S. High Yield Very Liquid ESG Select Index.
• Stays close to that benchmark in practice, one of the tighter implementations among high-yield ETFs.
• Spreads the credit risk across roughly 400 bonds and pays income monthly.

Worth knowing

• 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.

• NUHY The shares themselves trade thinly next to the category's giants, which can mean wider spreads on the way in and out.
• Nuveen's own NHYB is built on the same declared index for 0.08%, a meaningfully cheaper route to the same exposure.
• This is below-investment-grade credit. Default risk is real, and these bonds can slide alongside stocks when markets turn.

Full HYLB profile⁠

Full NUHY profile⁠