HYLB vs ZTOP

HYLBAXtrackers USD High Yield Corporate Bond ETF

ZTOPBF/m High Yield 100 ETF

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.

ZTOP Most junk-bond funds sample the whole market. This one holds only the 100 largest, most liquid US high-yield issuers, weights them equally, and reshuffles monthly. A quality screen, not a market cross-section.

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.

ZTOP The Fund seeks before-fee-and-expense results that generally correspond to the price and yield performance of the Bloomberg U.S. High Yield Top 100 Quality Select Equal Weighted 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).

• ZTOP Equal weighting means no single borrower dominates, and the index is reconstituted and rebalanced monthly to stay on the biggest, most liquid issuers.businesswire.comfminvest.com
• The index rules screen out pay-in-kind and zero-coupon bonds, the corners of junk where cash actually stops showing up.bbhub.io
• The 0.39% fee sits right at the high-yield category median, and the fund pays monthly.
• The portfolio matches its stated mandate closely, and it lands in the upper half of a crowded high-yield field.

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.

• ZTOP Plain-vanilla rivals cost a fraction of this: SCYB, SPHY and USHY all price under a tenth of a percent. The screen is what you are paying up for.
• Launched in 2025, so it has not yet traded through a full credit cycle, and its history is short next to the category's veterans.
• Concentrating on the largest issuers tilts the portfolio up in credit quality and away from the deep-discount, lower-rated end of junk.fminvest.cometftrends.com

Full HYLB profile⁠

Full ZTOP profile⁠