Please send feedback and tips to christine.idzelis@marketwatch.com or isabel.wang@marketwatch.com. You can also follow me on X at @cidzelis and find me on LinkedIn. Isabel Wang is at @Isabelxwang.Investors have been fleeing exchange-traded funds that buy corporate junk debt, a risky pocket of fixed income that has been outperforming the total U.S. investment-grade bond market as yields surge.
“You’re getting a lot more carry,” said Steve Laipply, global co-head of bond ETFs at BlackRock, by phone. “That helps cushion price declines.” High-yield, or junk, bond ETFs were falling Thursday as Treasury yields rose, after a report on inflation showed that headline consumer prices rose slightly more than Wall Street expectations for September.
Earlier this month, the iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond ETF traded more than $10 billion on Oct. 4 to mark its highest daily trading volume since its inception in 2007, a spokesperson for BlackRock said in an email that same week. The smaller iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond ETF is the largest exchange-traded fund targeting corporate junk bonds, according to Aniket Ullal, head of ETF data and analytics at CFRA Research. The fund has around $13 billion of assets under management, FactSet data show.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note BX:TMUBMUSD10Y climbed 11.5 basis points on Thursday to 4.710%, while 2-year Treasury rates BX:TMUBMUSD02Y rose 6.6 basis points to 5.069%, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Yields on six-month T-bills BX:TMUBMUSD06M were even higher, at around 5.56% on Thursday afternoon, according to FactSet data.