The following is an excerpt from Best Stocks 2018: Enterprise Products Partners L.P. Is Still Strong, originally published on InvestorPlace.
I can’t say I’m happy to be finishing the first quarter in last place in InvestorPlace’s Best Stocks for 2018 contest.
But I’ve been here before.
In the 2016 contest, I was dead last by the end of the first quarter, and at one point in time I was down by more than 70%.
Yes, you read that right. My pick that year — midstream pipeline operator Energy Transfer Equity (ETE) — was sitting on a 70% loss. But by year end, it had made back all of those losses and finished the year with a 53% gain — handing me the Best Stocks crown in the process.
Then, as now, the entire pipeline sector had just come off of a brutal bloodletting. As I write this, many of the blue chips in the space are down 20%-30% from their 52-week highs.
But by the second quarter, the fear started to dissipate, and buyers began to return to the market. 2016 ended up being a good year for the sector, and I expect that 2018 will be as well.
Now let’s take a look at my entry for 2018, blue chip MLP Enterprise Products Partners (EPD). Enterprise, like the rest of the MLP sector, has taken its lumps and is down about 9% year-to-date. But news for the company has generally been positive. The company beat analyst expectations for both revenues and earnings last quarter and raised its distribution nearly 4%.
To read the full article, see Best Stocks 2018: Enterprise Products Partners L.P. Is Still Strong.
Disclosures: Long ETE, EPD