Author's note: This article was initially released to CEF/ETF Income Laboratory members on April 21, 2020.
The BlackRock Core Bond (BHK) is a leveraged fixed-income CEF focusing on investment-grade treasuries, corporate bonds, and mortgage-backed securities, but investing in a wide variety of fixed-income securities. BHK's risk-return profile is somewhere between that of a corporate bond index ETF and that of more aggressive high-yield high-risk fixed-income CEFs, including most comparable PIMCO funds like PCN and PTY.
BHK's underlying holdings perform about as well as those of the Vanguard Long-Term Corporate Bond Index ETF (