Around eighteen months ago I introduced a relatively young master limited partnership (MLP): Shell Midstream Partners (NYSE: SHLX). As its name suggests, Shell Midstream is a dropdown MLP consisting of certain midstream oil & gas assets initially spun out of Royal Dutch Shell. Now, for the conservative income investor assets like oil pipelines and terminals are great in theory. In…

Having recently covered ExxonMobil it would be remiss of me to leave out fellow North American major Chevron (NYSE: CVX). Back in the dark days of 2015/16 the latter had arguably the worst outlook of the big oil companies depending on how you view things. For instance, the relative difference between cash generated by Chevron’s business operations and cash spent…

Over the past three years ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM) stock has noticeably underperformed compared to its four super-major peers: Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Total of France. $10,000 invested into Exxon stock three years ago is currently worth just $10,780. In contrast, that same $10,000 lump sum invested into any one of its peers would currently be worth anywhere between…

When it rains it pours is a phrase that springs to mind whenever I think about Kraft Heinz stock. If losing almost half of its 2015 peak value and contending with sluggish growth wasn’t bad enough, we were then hit with news of a multi-billion dollar write down of certain brands, a SEC investigation into the company’s accounting polices and…

When dealing with commodity shares always bear in mind the counter intuitive nature of their valuations. In good times earnings tend to be sky high. As a result conventional valuation metrics like the price-to-earnings ratio might look very cheap. Conversely when times are bad earnings crater and the same metric might look very expensive. The reality is that the complete…

Google’s parent company Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) released its 2018 results amid the flurry of news over the past few weeks. Overall the figures looked good to me, even though the market’s reaction was more ambivalent. I’ll start with the major plus point: growth is strong, and I think you can make a good case that it is trading at a…