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Master
Limited Partnerships (MLPs): Rx For Soft
Economy
If the economy is softening, as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke
suggested last week, your best stock bets might be steady-eddies with
minimal downside risk, and paying higher dividends than you get from
CDs.
Energy pipeline operators might fill that bill. They transport crude
oil, natural gas, and other petroleum products through their pipelines.
They enjoy a stable and profitable business, because, in most cases,
their fees are based on the volume of product transported, not on the
price of oil or natural gas. Pipelines rarely duplicate one another’s
routes, so they have no competition.
Because the demand for petroleum products is rising, many pipeline
operators are growing earnings and dividends, either by acquiring
existing pipelines from third parties, building new pipelines, or by
increasing the capacity of existing facilities.
Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs)
The pipelines that pay high dividends are usually organized as
Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs). Although not corporations, MLPs
trade on major stock exchanges, just like stocks.
MLPs have a general partner and limited partners. The general partner
manages the operation and individual investors are limited partners. The
general partner receives a percentage of the profits off the top, before
the limited partners get their cut.
Currently, most MLPs are paying dividends equating to
5% to 9% dividend yields (your yield is
the next 12 months expected dividends divided by the price you paid for
the shares).
MLPs pay big dividends because they don’t pay corporate income taxes.
Instead, the income is allocated to the partners.
MLPs have their own lingo. Shares are called units and dividends are
called distributions. So instead of paying dividends to shareholders,
MLPs pay distributions to unit holders.
Tax Issues
MLPs offer potential tax advantages because most of their
distributions are classified as a return of investment instead of
income. You don’t pay taxes on that portion until you sell. However,
when you do sell, you’ll be taxed at the ordinary income rate, not as
capital gains.
On the downside, MLPs require the use of special forms at tax time,
which some investors consider too complicated. Also, holding MLPs in
tax-sheltered accounts such as IRAs could incur penalties if you collect
distributions totaling more than $1,000 annually. If that’s your
situation, consult a tax advisor before investing.
Finding MLPs
Screening is the best way to find worthwhile MLP candidates. If
you’re not familiar with the term, stock screeners are programs
available on financial sites that you can use to search the entire
market for stocks meeting your particular requirements.
MSN Money’s Deluxe Screener (moneycentral.msn.com)
and Yahoo’s Basic Stock Screener are the only free screeners I know of
that can search specifically for pipeline operators. Of the two, Yahoo’s
screener is easier to use, so I’ll use it to demonstrate the process.
From the Yahoo Finance homepage (finance.yahoo.com),
select
Investing, click on
stocks, and then
select “Launch
HTML Screener.”
Set Up Your Screen
Once there, click on “Oil & Gas Pipelines” in the Industry
Selection box to confine your search to stocks in that category. Next,
specify your minimum acceptable dividend yield. I set my minimum at 5%
because that is well above current CD rates. Try lowering it to 4% if
you want to see more stocks.
Your best prospects are MLPs that are growing earnings, and hence
dividends. Stock analysts generally forecast the next five year’s
average annual earnings growth rate for stocks that they cover. Yahoo
lets you screen on consensus (average) five-year earnings growth
forecasts. I selected 5% minimum, which is good for high dividend
stocks.
Analysts usually publish buy, sell, or hold ratings on stocks that they
cover. Those ratings are based mostly on earnings growth expectations,
not dividend safety or expected dividend growth, which would be of more
value to us. Thus, I reasoned that as long as analysts aren’t advising
selling a stock, it’s a viable candidate. I required “Hold Rating or
better” for average analyst recommendation.
Found Six MLPs
Yahoo listed six MLPs with dividend yields ranging from 5.8% to
9.0% when I ran the screen: Copano Energy (5.8% yield), Enbridge Energy
Partners (7.4%), Energy Transfer Partners (9.0%), Magellan Midstream
Partners (5.9%), Oneok Partners (6.4%) and Sunoco Logistics Partners
(6.6%). Disclosure: I own shares of Copano Energy and Energy Transfer
Partners.
Copano is not an MLP, it’s a “Limited Liability Company” or LLC. As
such, Copano has no master partner to take a cut off the top. All of the
profits go to shareholders. However, for tax purposes, LLCs are treated
the same as MLPs.
As the case for all screens, consider the results as candidates for
further research, not a buy list.
You can’t analyze an MLP the same as you would a regular stock. MLPs own
lots of assets that result in large depreciation charges that subtract
from reported earnings, but don’t affect the cash flow that fuels
dividends. Your best prospects are MLPs with a strong dividend growth
history and plenty of pipeline construction projects underway.
You can see the dividend growth history on Yahoo by getting a
price quote,
clicking on
Historical
Prices and then selecting “Dividends
Only.”
You can learn about an MLP’s expansion plans by reading the management
summary portions of their quarterly and annual reports. You can see the
SEC reports on Yahoo by selecting
SEC
Filings and then looking for reports labeled 10-Q (quarterly) and
10-K (annual). Once you’ve found a report, select Summary to read the
management’s discussion.
This may sound like work, but if you pick the right MLPs, you’ll
probably end up holding them for years, so it’s time well spent.
published 2/17/08 |
