I love meeting the people who read what I write, who think that what I write is worth their hard-earned money.

I love it because I get to talk about the issues and businesses that occupy my days and nights, but which much of the world doesn’t much care about, with people who share those interests.

I also get to hear new points of view and learn what excites and worries investors from a variety of walks of life and regions of the country.

I’d like to think that we will all eventually meet at one of Investing Daily’s annual Wealth Summits, the last one held two weeks ago in Denver. It’s a chance to learn something new, have fun and maybe come away with an idea or two.

I tried to have fun with my presentation (see In Focus), but also to make a couple of points I’d like to stress here. The midstream sector’s cash flows are showing impressive resilience to sharply lower energy prices, so that the fundamentals look significantly better than the equity prices have of late.

Credit the shale drillers who, after wringing huge discounts from their suppliers, are maintaining production volumes very near the recent peak. In fact, while we’ve all heard about how output is now slowing, some drillers have begun to upgrade 2015 drilling plans following the spring rally in oil prices.

Their breakevens — the oil and gas prices they need to get to make drilling worthwhile — are down sharply since last fall amid supplier discounting and continuous refinement of the technologies and techniques of hydraulic fracturing. Shale is winning the fight for investment dollars against riskier, costlier offshore wells, and against OPEC basket cases like Venezuela and Nigeria.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the midstream sector is not only the indispensable value-added processor of the shale bounty but also the irreplaceable shipper of just about all the energy America consumes, and will continue to consume whether a barrel of crude costs $40 or $140.

Beyond the quarterly fluctuations that get all of us so worked up there is a tremendous stability to the business simply because utilities need to generate power and motorists to fill their tanks with numbing constancy in good times and bad.

So that, for example, the outlook for propane distributors has improved with glutted propane on clearance sale, a trend you can read about in Sector Spotlight.

The outlook for pipeline operators overlapping the riches of Marcellus is pretty darn good too, and New Buys highlights a time-sensitive opportunity in that vein.

Last but not least we have the landmark loss by Kinder Morgan (NYSE: KMI), in Delaware’s business-friendly courts no less, to the investors claiming that an MLP Kinder has since swallowed overpaid for assets sold by its corporate sponsor. It’s a tale of corporate mendacity and incompetence that will give you shivers. See News and Notes for the gory details.

Friendship is magic indeed, especially if you can install your friends somewhere they get to spend other people’s money to your mutual benefit.