The early part of 2017 has been kind to MLP investors. The generally reliable year-end effect has seen prices rise (see Give Your Loved One an MLP This Holiday Season). President Trump’s unabashedly supportive stance towards energy infrastructure has certainly helped sentiment, as have a number of corporate finance moves. The Alerian Index is up almost […]
As I watched President Trump’s inauguration speech on January 20th, I was reminded of Paul Kennedy’s 1987 book, The Rise and Fall of the Powers. Kennedy charts the arc of many great empires over the last couple of millennia. He finds a repeated cycle of geographic enlargement through technological and economic dominance followed eventually by […]
Recently in A Few Thoughts on Long Term Energy Use we included the striking chart shown again below comparing CO2 emissions from power generation in the U.S. and Germany. It elicited quite a few comments from readers because it showed that Germany is now lagging behind the U.S. on this metric. Germany has set out […]
In our recent blog post America Is Great!, we described the success of America’s shale producers in the face of OPEC’s intention back in 2014 to bankrupt them with lower oil prices. The recent agreement on reductions in output was a concession that this strategy had failed (see OPEC Blinks). America’s private sector had bested […]
With only the slightest risk of hyperbole, I can assert that anything written by Michael Lewis is worth reading. His latest work, The Undoing Project, recounts the friendship between two Israeli psychologists which led to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman, with his late friend Amos Tversky, developed an area of Behavioral Economics which […]
Every year Exxon Mobil publishes their outlook for global energy over the next 25 years. It’s an absorbing read for people who care about such things. Their projections may not all be right, but they have to think about such issues pretty carefully and make long term investment decision based in part on their views. […]
Back in 2014 they were unlikely adversaries. Saudi Energy Minister Ali Al-Naimi, and Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD) CEO Scott Sheffield (pictured below) had both made their careers in the oil business. They had each spent formative years abroad, with Al-Naimi attending Lehigh University and Sheffield going to high school in Iran (his father worked […]
Although we mostly write about the energy infrastructure sector, we also run an investment strategy designed around low volatility stocks. There’s generally less to say on this sector – we long ago concluded that exploiting the relative under-pricing of such stocks could not be improved much with market timing. So we hold securities we’d be […]
There is around $53BN invested in MLPs via ’40 Act funds – the term used to describe the three major types of funds issued under the 1940 Investment Company Act (mutual, exchange traded and closed end funds). It’s safe to say that an important motivating factor driving these selections is investors’ desire to hold Master […]
Once again a corporate executive team has demonstrated childlike innocence when dealing with the hard-nosed providers of equity capital. Tetra Technologies (TTI) is the latest firm to combine a good business with a clueless approach to funding it. TTI supports the oil and gas industry, providing a wide array of products and services including fluids, […]
