SHY: iShares 1-3 Year Treasury Bond ETF

What does SHY hold?#

This fund holds US government bonds that will be paid back in 1 to 3 years. Because the bonds are paid back soon, the fund’s price usually moves less than funds with longer bonds. It pays out interest income each month.

It tracks the ICE U.S. Treasury 1-3 Year Bond Index. It had 90 holdings as of October 15, 2026, according to iShares (BlackRock).

What is the SHY expense ratio?#

SHY charges 0.15% a year. An expense ratio is the yearly fee a fund takes to run itself. On $10,000, a 0.15% fee comes to about $15 a year.

You never get a bill for it. The fund takes the fee out of its own value a little each day.

How has SHY done since 2002?#

From July 2002 to October 2026, SHY returned about 2.0% a year. Say you put in $10,000 at the start. It would have been worth about $16,041 at the end, with every dividend reinvested.

Prices through October 16, 2026. Figures use daily closing prices adjusted for splits, with dividends reinvested. They do not include taxes or the cost of buying and selling. Past results do not tell you what will happen next.

SHY returns by year#

What was SHY’s worst drop?#

A drawdown is how far a fund falls from its last high point. SHY’s worst fall was −5.7%, from August 3, 2021 to October 20, 2022. It got back to that high on June 3, 2024.

The chart shows how far below its last high the fund was on each day. Big drops are normal for some funds. They matter because selling during a drop locks in the loss.

Which Tactfolio strategies hold SHY?#

8 classic strategies hold SHY at least some of the time. Each is a set of written rules you can open, test and copy.

• Vigilant Asset Allocation (VAA), by Wouter Keller and JW Keuning, 2017
• Defensive Asset Allocation (DAA), by Wouter Keller and JW Keuning, 2018
• Protective Asset Allocation (PAA), by Wouter Keller and JW Keuning, 2016
• Vigilant Asset Allocation G12 (VAA-G12), by Wouter Keller and JW Keuning, 2017
• Paul Novell’s Tactical Bond Strategy, by Paul Novell, 2014
• Golden Butterfly Portfolio, by Tyler (Portfolio Charts), 2015
• Lethargic Asset Allocation (Keller’s LAA), by Wouter J. Keller, 2019
• Bond UI1 (Paul Novell’s unemployment bond strategy), by Paul Novell, 2019

How does SHY compare with similar ETFs?#

Funds that can stand in for SHY:

• VGSH: Vanguard Short-Term Treasury ETF, 0.03% a year
• SGOV: iShares 0-3 Month Treasury Bond ETF, 0.09% a year
• BIL: State Street SPDR Bloomberg 1-3 Month T-Bill ETF, 0.1353% a year
• SHV: iShares 0-1 Year Treasury Bond ETF, 0.15% a year

See all 8 SHY alternatives, compared on the same dates as SHY.

Test SHY in your own rules#

Tactfolio is a platform where you build rules-based investing strategies, backtest them on decades of real prices, share them, and run them automatically in your own Alpaca account. Open the builder, add SHY, and see how a rule such as “hold it only above its 200-day average” would have done. Strategies run on daily prices and hold US stocks and ETFs only.

The details#

Prices come from Tactfolio’s stored daily prices for SHY. Each close is adjusted for splits, and dividends are reinvested on the day the fund pays them out. CAGR is the steady yearly return that turns the starting value into the ending value. Volatility is the yearly standard deviation of daily returns.

Fund facts come from iShares (BlackRock). We checked them on October 16, 2026. Read what a backtest simulates and how to read drawdown and CAGR for more on these measures.