Investment grade vs high yield investments?

I'm currently working at a fixed income shop as an IG credit analyst. I'm thinking of transitioning into HY. The IG investment space is bigger than HY but HY seems to offer more career opportunities due to the transferable skills I get to acquire from analyzing HY names.

Career plan: If I were to stick to the portfolio management route, IG investments are bigger than HY hence more money and money opportunities. But at the same time, I am also interested in exploring transational experiences such as private debt and private equity then maybe HY would be more helpful in that regard?

Any advice and insight is greatly appreciated.

 
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There are roles where you are not silo'd into IG or HY. If you want greater exposure to different parts of the credit market, I would seek those out. This would be fund/firm dependent but the strategy would likely fall under the opportunistic credit bucket. 

Your line of thinking "IG investments are bigger than HY hence more money and money opportunities" doesn't make sense. Are you talking about your personal comp? Or the universe of potential investment ideas? In either case, it's the wrong way to think about it. Just because a market / asset class is larger vs. another doesn't make it the better  spot to be in. 

 

It depends a bit on the shop, but I'd say generally HY requires a lot more fundamental analysis whereas IG consists more of playing the relval game. This is especially the case when you go down in credit quality to single-B and below, because these names do blow up at times and avoiding the losers is the way to outperform.

 

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