Master Limited Partnerhips

Last week, the Energy & Income Advisor team attended the National Association of Publicly Traded Partnerships’ (NAPTP) annual MLP Investor Conference in Ponte Vedra, Fla. Here are our takeaways.

The National Association of Publicly Traded Partnerships' annual MLP Investor Conference is just around the corner.

Mention master limited partnerships and sooner or later someone will bring up taxes. The big worry: A US version of Canada’s infamous Halloween Massacre of 2006, which shaved $24 billion off the value of income trusts in two weeks.

One pipeline company rewards investors with a 70 percent total return the year after it restores regular distribution growth. The other’s unit price falls nearly in half after it guts its payout by more than 80 percent.

24.

That’s how many stocks we track at Energy & Income Advisor and Conrad’s Utility Investor that yield more than 10 percent.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for an official retraction. But after the past few days’ events, arguments made by Hedgeye and Barron’s against oil and gas producer master limited partnerships are effectively in tatters.

When the research firm Hedgeye came out with a report blasting a long-time favorite of mine—Kinder Morgan Energy Partners (NYSE: KMP)—my first question was what have they seen that I have not to date? Is there something most of us who research this master limited partnership have overlooked, some critical Achilles heel that could in Hedgeye’s words make Kinder and related companies a “house of cards?”

Similarly, I wondered why Hedgeye had chosen to pick on Kinder, rather than a master limited partnership (MLP) with more obvious troubles such as NuStar Energy (NYSE: NS). The latter, for example, has failed to cover its distribution with distributable cash flow (DCF) for several quarters now, even leaving aside its extremely aggressive capital spending.

The pullback in master limited partnerships after the Federal Reserve announced plans to scale back quantitative easing gave investors an opportunity to buy Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP (NYSE: KMP) at a favorable price.