The nice thing about the annual portfolio checkup is that it tells us a lot. The risk is that the neat columns of numbers might convince us that we know more than we really do.

It’s certainly useful to be able to tell at a glance, as you can from the tables below, the distribution yield, growth rate and coverage for every one of out portfolio recommendations, along with their price performance over the last year and management’s outlook for 2015. The full spreadsheet you can access here adds stats on annual changes on revenue, cash earnings and the unit/share count, along with debt and valuation ratios and a description of direct commodity exposure.

These numbers were not spat out by a database but rather calculated by hand from recently filed annual reports, a process that should make them somewhat more reliable.

Still, they represent just one imperfect snapshot, frozen in time, of an industry in constant motion. They’re also, with the exception of the 2015 guidance, of necessity retrospective. And that means they cannot fully convey the changed state of affairs following the recent drops in the price of crude and natural gas.

What the spreadsheet does suggest, in noting the income protections in place, is that this is not an industry at the mercy of the commodity markets. U.S. energy consumption continues to rise, a little faster now that unleaded is so cheap. And, regardless of the wellhead price, the need and the economic incentives to ship the hydrocarbons and process them into fuel haven’t gone away.

The process of compiling the information has been both maddening and enlightening. It’s forced me to confront the peculiarities of each partnership’s accounting and to wrestle with corporate ties that have sometimes been difficult to untangle. How does one figure out the fundamentals for a sponsor of an MLP that mostly consolidates its results with those of the affiliated partnership? How does one account for the sponsor’s limited partnership stake in evaluating both entities?

In each case, I aimed to present the reality of a particular situation to the degree allowed by the accounting disclosures. That means the numbers are not perfectly comparable, but the comparisons they do invite should still prove useful.

Wading into this thicket of MLP accounting has already yielded some useful insights.  It’s hard, for example, not to be excited about the goings on in the tanker space, whether it’s Scorpio Tankers’ (NYSE: STNG) exponential growth, hitting the market with an armada of new ships with what appears to be the case of perfect timing, or the cash flow that Teekay Tankers (NYSE: TNK) is already pumping out, even if that hasn’t yet delivered a larger dividend.

I did not quite realize before embarking on this project that Energy Transfer Equity’s (NYSE: ETE) distributions from affiliates will jump 47% this year. I mean, it was obvious they were rising fast, but the number was still impressive. It certainly informs ETE’s decision to launch a $2 billion unit buyback while raising its distribution by 30% year-over-year.

It’s nice to know that 82% of EQT Midstream’s (NYSE: EQM) revenue comes from fixed-fee contracts lasting a decade or more, and 61% from transmission reservations with an average remaining term of 17 years.

It’s also useful to have noticed that Spectra Energy (NYSE: SE) is promotional and petty enough to keep plugging its planned 8% dividend growth in 2015-2017, without mentioning its slowdown to 7% this year.  

This is the perfect time of year to round up distribution hints and forecasts, and while a couple of producer-focused businesses, notably Targa Resources (NYSE: TRGP) and Hi-Crush Partners (NYSE: HCLP), could well rein in dramatic increases somewhat, others like Capital Products Partners (NASDAQ: CPLP) and NuStar Energy (NYSE: NS) are considering hikes for the first time in years in response to improvements in their business.

New this year is a measure of the annual change in the share/unit count, providing useful insight into the degree of reliance of equity financing.

Another innovation is the column in the tables below showing the price performance of a given recommendation over the last year. This span includes the five months last spring and summer when MLPs and energy stocks could do no wrong, and the ensuing seven months, when very little has gone right.

What’s notable here is that over the full year so many of these MLPs haven’t lost much, if any, ground, especially considering the additional return from distributions. In fact, investors in 2014 Best Buys like ETE, Magellan Midstream Partners (NYSE: MMP), Kinder Morgan (NYSE: KMI) and Williams (NYSE: WMB) have done very well.

And after reviewing all the numbers our enthusiasm for our current picks is undiminished.