Income Insights

There’s no doubt AT&T Inc (NYSE: T) faces some steep challenges in early 2021. Just days before the company announced Q1 earnings last week, a Wall Street Journal piece featured the views of a prominent bear under the headline “Is AT&T a Train Wreck?” 

The company’s Q1 numbers and updated guidance, however, paint a far different picture.

Even without a repeat of the company’s Q1 windfall, the benefits to Kinder Morgan Inc.’s (NYSE: KMI) underlying business and balance sheet are likely to continue flowing throughout the rest of 2021 and beyond.

Yieldcos made their debut in the middle of the previous decade, as renewable energy’s answer to master limited partnerships but waned in popularity as MLPs collapsed, and the Trump administration instituted policies unfriendly to renewable energy. But there are two very good reasons to expect an eventual return of yieldco IPOs.

Exhaustive reviews, impossible public interest standards and no guarantee of eventual success: That’s the consensus outlook for mergers and acquisitions activity under the Biden Administration. Nonetheless, utility M&A is alive and well.

Our advice to heed the lessons of Robinhood.com has already proven timely: Build capital gains on solid business fundamentals, cash out of high-flyers and invest in successful adopters of wind and solar.

When a monthly power bill hits $1,700 plus, people are bound to wonder if there’s a better way to run an electricity market.

Single digit temperatures, record snowfall, millions of utility customers without service, nearly one-third of the state’s power generating capacity shut down and spiking electricity prices: That’s the damage so far from the Great Texas Power Crisis of 2021, which continues wreak havoc across the Lone Star State.

Writing under the famous pen name Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens coined the phrase “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

I’m not the first to apply that bit of country wisdom to investing. But it’s always worth revisiting in the aftermath of extraordinary market events.

Getting Kinder Morgan Inc's (NYSE: KMI) Permian Highway Pipeline on line and running was not without obstacles. And getting it past fierce opposition testifies to the strength of Kinder’s management

Gas companies strengthened their case during pandemic-wracked 2020 by demonstrating extremely stable economics, paying generous dividends backed by ultra-secure and growing cash flows, and still remaining small enough to have perennial takeover appeal. Those strengths promise to make natural gas distribution a hot commodity again in 2021.