Portfolio Action Summary

• Cedar Fair (NYSE: FUN) added to Aggressive Portfolio. Buy below $58
• Hi-Crush Partners  (NYSE: HCLP) added to Aggressive Portfolio. Buy below $40
• UBS ETRACS 2xMonthly Leveraged Long Alerian MLP Infrastructure Index ETN (NYSE: MLPL) added to Aggressive Portfolio. Buy below $58
• Capital Products Partners (NASDAQ: CPLP) buy limit increased to $10 in Aggressive Portfolio

After the wreckage of the fall and the relentless selling of December and the first half of January, it’s nice to draw a line under the past and move forward. And it’s certainly easier to do after the strong performance delivered by our Best Buys in 2014.

Getting there took a couple of well-timed partial sales last summer, along with significant outperformance by most of our top picks. Please see In Focus for details.

This might be our last chance to bask in the average-boosting glories of last June, because the market weather for anything tied to energy production has certainly turned frightful since, imparting downward momentum that can’t be ignored or dismissed.

At the same time, the selling appears to have reached at least a near-term point of exhaustion. The upcoming slate of earnings reports should relieve some of the fear about the rapid drop in energy prices by showcasing the resilience of midstream cash flows.

Our New Buys this month feature a leveraged bet on a recovery by MLPs, backed by a double-digit yield, along with an amusement parks operator that will benefit from lower gasoline prices next summer.

You’ll find another new recommendation in this month’s Sector Spotlight on fracking sand suppliers. It’s a niche that should keep growing right through the oil crash as drillers pump more and more sand into shale to get the most out of each expensive well they drill. But we would probably need significantly higher oil prices in the medium term to hit pay dirt with this selection.

Our new list of Best Buys for 2015 is positioned for more volatility and low crude prices. The top six picks are major midstream players, including many of last year’s standouts. The last four spots on the list went to relatively high-yielding niche downstream players that tend to cope better with lower crude prices. We think we have the right mix of caution and controlled aggression, yield and scale.

This year we’re also providing several subsidiary lists (high yield, high growth, etc.) to help readers navigate our growing portfolio.

Speaking of which. Sometime soon, ideally after a rally, we will likely start pruning our recommendations a bit. We want to continue making new ones as opportunities arise without bloating the portfolio in a way that obscures and dilutes our best ideas.

Portfolio Update will return next month with news from many of the earnings conference calls. In March, we’ll do another Portfolio X-Ray updating the key indicators for all our recommendations.

Here’s to an early spring in MLP land.