Bad week for energy and utilities.  While the S&P was up 0.3%, XLE (integrated energy) dropped 2.3% and XLU (utilities) was down 1.1%.  AMJ, an unlevered, pure MLP midstream ETN, dropped 1.7%.

 

With 1 exception, this continues the YTD trend.  The S&P is up 9.5% YTD, while XLU is down 7.7% and XLE is down 9%.  AMJ bucks the energy trend, however, and is up 6.2% YTD.  I don't have an exact number, but I think the vast majority of AMJ's positive performance is due to its 13% (or so) weighting to MMP, which is up a lot because it is being acquired.

 

Anyway, generally down for energy and midstreams.  The MLPs and midstreams I track were down 1.3% in price and 1.7% in market cap last week.

 

On this basis, you'd think MLP CEFs didn't have such a good week and you'd be right.   They were down 2% in NAV and 2.1% in price.  On the basis of NAV, there really weren't any winners.  Basically all the funds were down in the vicinity of 2%.  But prices varied.  SRV was the best performer in price, rising 0.8%.  That's it for the winners.  The First Trust funds were the biggest overall losers, with all 4 of them down between 3.5% and 4.8% in price.  I was surprised last week that these 4 funds had outperformed the XLU by a bit, but this week the utilities bug finally hit them hard, I guess.

 

No news this week, except that Saba has started buying EMO again.  After losing the proxy fight, they are now up to 17% ownership.

 

Since there was no news, I looked at the YTD performance numbers. I don't understand some of this.  TYG and NTG, 2 funds run by Tortoise, have lost 10.7% and 8.3% respectively, of their NAV YTD.  I know they don't own much MMP and that hurts, but I'm still not sure why the damage has been that great.  The price performance has been similar for TYG, which is down 9.7%.  NTG's discount has shrunk a lot YTD so it's only down 3.2% in price.

 

The average fund is down 0.4% YTD, including distributions, but there are several funds that have outperformed.  SRV is up 6.5% (paying out a huge distribution sure helps), CEN (merging into an open end fund) is up 5.7%, CTR (Clearbridge) is up 4.2% and GER (Goldman) is up 4.9%.  But most of the funds are down. And there is a lot of recent news about declining US energy production over the next year or 2 that, if true, will continue to hurt midstream companies.  So I'm not sure the pain is over, even if we get a budget deal.