저자: TylerCrowe/JasonHall · 외국인
요약 보기
빌 그로스가 고배당 MLP(에너지 중류 파이프라인 기업)에 관심을 보였으나, 해설자들은 고수익률 자체만으로 투자하는 것은 위험하며 사업 펀더멘털을 확인해야 한다고 주장한다. 빌 그로스는 고금리 환경에서 세제 혜택과 높은 현금흐름을 이유로 MLP에 우호적이었고, 방송에서 수익률이 가장 높은 MLP 몇 개를 언급했다. MLP는 세금 구조상 법인세 없이 현금 분배가 많아 수익률이 7~10%대로 높은 경우가 흔하다. 해설자들은 같은 업종 경쟁사보다 수익률이 과도하게 높다면 시장이 그만한 이유를 반영한 것일 수 있어 주의가 필요하다고 본다. 예시로 Energy Transfer는 수익률이 10% 이상이지만, 2020년 배당 대폭 삭감과 장기간 배당 동결 이력이 있어 안정성이 떨어진다고 지적했다. 해설자들이 상대적으로 안정적인 후보로 꼽은 것은 Enterprise Products Partners(EPD, 수익률 7.5% 이상)와 MPLX(수익률 9% 이상)다. 두 기업 모두 현금 배당 커버리지 비율이 높아 배당 안정성이 크고 소폭 배당 성장 여지도 있다고 평가했다. 핵심 결론: 고수익률 MLP를 무조건 사기보다 커버리지 비율과 사업 펀더멘털을 따져 고르라는 것이다.
다듬은 글
All right, Tyler. You know who Bill Gross is, I know who Bill Gross is. There's probably a lot of people watching this video who do and maybe just as many or more who do not know who Bill Gross is. But, suffice it to say, he is a long-time investor. He knows a little thing about yield. And he made some comments.
Uh, how long has it been, Tyler? I It was like a week ago. I feel like we were just talking about a couple days ago. So, anyway, he made some comments about MLPs, which are a certain cohort of energy stocks and material stocks that generally pay pretty high yields. And Tyler's got a take about what Bill Gross got right and what Bill Gross got wrong about those energy stocks.
We're going to talk about that here. Help you make sense of some of these stocks, maybe help you figure out which ones are investable and which ones you might want to just keep over on your watch list. I'm Jason Hall. This is The Smattering. Before Tyler and I get into Bill Gross's comments, just a reminder, The Motley Fool sponsors our videos.
If you're looking for even more great stock ideas than what we have for you on this video, check out our special link. It's fool.com/thesmattering. And The Motley Fool's going to give you its 10 best stocks to buy right now. Tyler and I will just will wait. Tyler, you just want to wait? I got time. Okay.
Okay, welcome back everybody. Tyler, let's talk about Bill Gross, exactly who he is and what he had to say. He's probably more well known as the bond king. Oh, Bill Gross ran a bond fund at the company PIMCO and was one of kind of the rock stars of bond investing from uh, the '80s on, which happened to coincide with one of the best bond markets of in centuries because of declining interest rates, but that's neither here nor there.
But, on a recent inter- interview, Timing often makes for some of the most amazing careers. Let's be honest. very true. But, in a recent interview on the Odd Lots podcast, something that little peek behind the curtain, Jason text each other while listening to it all the time. On that podcast, he mentioned that he was really enthusiastic would probably be the best term I can give about investing in master limited partnerships.
The idea, looking at it, is he was looking for high-yield investments that were, you know, commensurate with like a high-yield environment. We have higher interest rates right now. Fixed income things don't look as attractive to treasuries and there's a lot of dividend stocks that don't look as attractive.
So, if you're going to The short version is if you're going to buy stocks based on yield, you need to be pickier, I think is his point right now, because there's so much good safe yield you can get just in a 30-day T-bill versus a stock where you also have to deal with the volatility the price and the risk that comes along with ownership of the company and all that kind of so Exactly.
But, he did happen to single out master limited partnerships, which are a special type of partnership carved out for mostly oil and gas and extractives and basically anything centered around energy and they've mostly uh, coalesced around pipelines, transportation, logistics, the middle men of North America's energy supply chain.
Which makes sense because if you think about MLPs and really their reason for existing is they're pass-through entities, right? They don't pay corporate income tax and that makes them more cash flow efficient. And as a result, they have more cash they can pay as as to as dividends, right? That's kind of the core thesis.
And where in the energy industry is the best place to generate steady cash flows? It's in the midstream. Right, running the pipelines, the storage facilities, the gathering um, aspects, all that kind of stuff. So far, Bill Gross, Yeah, check that. Makes sense. And if you look at the yields on a lot of these things, we're talking about master limited partnerships right now, have yields very commonly in the 7, 8, 10% range.
Which is That's even better than you're getting on those T-bills. Exactly. And you get a little Most of them have into a certain degree have a little bit of growth in them right now. And on the podcast, Bill Gross being in his late '70s, maybe early '80s, I can't remember. Sorry. Sorry, Bill, if you're listening, but he's at a retirement age and he's looking for tax-protected streams of cash.
And as like you said, as a pass-through entity, it's not not double taxation. You as the partnership limited partner pay at your income level, but because there's so much depreciation and other things that you get the benefit of owning like as the owner of the business, it greatly diminishes your tax obligation relative to how much you're actually making in terms of payout.
Consult your tax professionals, people. Yes, yes, but just gives you a rough idea. I'm not trying to be checks out. Everything checks out. That's the key. That's what he's saying. It absolutely checks out. Tax efficiency, high yield. Keep going, Tyler. So, all of this I agree with. And then they asked him, "Well, which ones?" And he started mentioning a few companies, uh, Energy Transfer and a few others, but basically And this is the part where they asked the bond guy for stock tips.
Exactly. And this is where it got weird. Because if you listen to the to what he talks about, he basically mentions basically the three highest yield master limited partnerships out there. It wasn't It didn't really seem to me like there was a deep investigation into the businesses themselves. It was a "I'm looking for high yield.
These are master limited partnerships with high yield. Bang, bang, awesome. Let's do this. Go for my 10% yields." So, Tyler, why would you caution investors if you're shopping for yield and you're looking at these MLPs, why would you caution investors away from the ones with the highest yield? Because you have to also look at the business fundamentals because there has to be a business that's paying those yields, that are paying out in cash flow to actually make this happen.
And just like a dividend stock, if you're paying out more than you're bringing in, you're going to run into trouble. And some of the companies a higher yield than say your two or three closest peers or competitors, there might not be a good reason because generally the market's efficient and finds those opportunities when they're good opportunities, bids it back up and all of a sudden that discounted stock price that's creating the higher yield no longer exists.
So, if that disparity continues, that's usually the market telling you something's not exactly perfect. Right. Now, so I'm going to just use an example here because the one that he that was mentioned the most was Energy Transfer. This is a master limited partnership. It's one of the largest out there.
And you know, high yield, I think it's somewhere around more than 10%. But, over the past 10 year, you know, if you're looking for income, you're looking for stability from that, this isn't hasn't really been the case with Energy Transfer. It's not been a steadily growing dividend over time. Back in 2020, there was a substantial cut to it and there have very, very long periods uh, in Energy Transfer's history where it's hasn't raised its dividend.
It went from basically 2017 to 2020 without raising its dividend distribution. And so, when you see things like that, it typically means that there might be issues of returns at the business, maybe it overpaid for some acquisitions, maybe its cash flows aren't doing as great as expected. So, things like that, it means that you can't just go out and buy these things for yield indiscriminately.
There are businesses behind them. And you should look for the fundamentals of those business to match up with what you're getting out of it. So, here's a take. We talk about these MLPs and these relatively secure cash flows. Just because this is the most secure play in the energy industry to do it, doesn't mean that every one of these is a safe stock.
I think that's the point. I don't think that you're saying Energy Transfer is not an okay company or a fine company, but you Again, when the yield's above everybody else in the industry, it's usually not for a good reason. Investors have to be conscious of that for the things you talked about. If I were to come to you and say, "Okay, you're not a bond guy, you're not actually an energy guy.
You know the the energy space. I know you have a pretty decent stable of investments in these sorts of companies. Where would you be looking to deploy capital today if you were looking for one of these high-yield, safe, still has some ability to grow the payout over time, where would you buy?" So, the two that I see in that vein are Enterprise Products Partners, ticker EPD, and MPLX.
Ticker's the same as the name. And both very high-yield instruments where their cash flow payouts are considerably lower than the cash that's coming in the door right now, giving them a lot of security in terms of their current payment should the business go south. Important term for these companies, cash payout ratio.
Yeah, or distribution coverage ratio, whatever you want to call it. Either way, their coverage ratios are very high, meaning the business would have to suffer substantially to compromise the dividend or at the same time gives them plenty of cushion to raise the dividend without huge growth internally at the business.
You know, there's not a lot of growth in oil pipelines right now. So, if you can get 2 to 3% annually, that's awesome. So, with that big cash cushion, they're expecting modest dividend increases, but I think for right now, I think MPLX currently has a dividend yield over 9% and I think Enterprise Partners right now is a little is at north of 7.5.
So, you start looking at that and those sort of yields look commensurate with the risk that we're taking on for a stock and still gives you some growth and a business that makes sense behind it.
Comments 0