I’m going to sit back in my rocking chair and let the great man break this whole thing down. See if you can guess who wrote this:

It should be an enormous advantage for investors in stocks to have those wildly fluctuating valuations placed on their holdings – and for some investors, it is. After all, if a moody fellow with a farm bordering my property yelled out a price every day to me at which he would either buy my farm or sell me his – and those prices varied widely over short periods of time depending on his mental state – how in the world could I be other than benefited by his erratic behavior? If his daily shout-out was ridiculously low, and I had some spare cash, I would buy his farm. If the number he yelled was absurdly high, I could either sell to him or just go on farming.

Owners of stocks, however, too often let the capricious and often irrational behavior of their fellow owners cause them to behave irrationally as well. Because there is so much chatter about markets, the economy, interest rates, price behavior of stocks, etc., some investors believe it is important to listen to pundits – and, worse yet, important to consider acting upon their comments.

Those people who can sit quietly for decades when they own a farm or apartment house too often become frenetic when they are exposed to a stream of stock quotations and accompanying commentators delivering an implied message of “Don’t just sit there, do something.” For these investors, liquidity is transformed from the unqualified benefit it should be to a curse.

A “flash crash” or some other extreme market fluctuation can’t hurt an investor any more than an erratic and mouthy neighbor can hurt my farm investment. Indeed, tumbling markets can be helpful to the true investor if he has cash available when prices get far out of line with values. A climate of fear is your friend when investing; a euphoric world is your enemy.

During the extraordinary financial panic that occurred late in 2008, I never gave a thought to selling my farm or New York real estate, even though a severe recession was clearly brewing. And, if I had owned 100% of a solid business with good long-term prospects, it would have been foolish for me to even consider dumping it. So why would I have sold my stocks that were small participations in wonderful businesses? True, any one of them might eventually disappoint, but as a group they were certain to do well. Could anyone really believe the earth was going to swallow up the incredible productive assets and unlimited human ingenuity existing in America?

The folksy sage counseling patience is, of course, the famously patient Warren Buffett, addressing Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-A) shareholders in the 2013 annual report.

Income investors and MLP limited partners in particular have been reminded over the last year just how depressing daily price quotes can become when prices only seem to go down. Our conceits at purchase about long-term time frames and heroic patience are too often exposed in the first correction and discarded alongside the disappointing investment at what too often proves the worst possible time.

We know what euphoria can do to subsequent returns. It was so pervasive in the summer of 2014 that one could note it repeatedly, warn readers of a sharp correction to come and still get blindsided by its length and severity.

The truth is that America’s long-term energy infrastructure needs are neither as boundless as they appeared a year ago nor as limited as they might seem now with energy prices too low to sustain the current production rate.

Offers you can refuse

The prices we’re bombarded with daily if not hourly are also shadows of what they were before the slump, of course.  And the bears are no wiser than the bulls – they too are all too ready to extrapolate recent trends into the distant future and to act rashly on those extrapolations.

Tuning out the short-term noise leaves one overriding long-term question to be answered in order to determine whether the midstream energy prices being quoted these days reflect rational concerns or unwarranted fear.

Can the world do with a lower U.S. energy output? That’s the big one, because U.S. accounted for 83% of the aggregate growth in global crude supply between 2008 and 2014, growth that went to satisfy demand that still hasn’t stopped growing and in fact has grown faster over the last year thanks to the lower fuel prices.

Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela are pumping every barrel they can in an attempt to make up at least a little of the huge revenue hit they’ve absorbed. But these are not the overachievers who can be counted on to deliver in the long run. Meanwhile, offshore drilling is on hold even as old wells on land and sea continue to deplete. As U.S. shale output starts to decline, prices ought to respond, and have arguably already begun to do so.

This, of course, ignores the fact that much of the midstream processing and shipping that takes place is done on behalf of customers rather than producers. Utilities can’t generate power without natural gas just like refiners can’t make gasoline without crude. Their energy demands are dictated by the daily needs of 319 million Americans once again buying pickup trucks and McMansions.

Satisfying their energy needs was a wonderful business before the shale revolution with its promises of all-out growth came along, and promises to remain a reliable income source long after the current slump is history. The prices on this income stream now reflect widespread concern that it will dry up to an extent at clear odds with the requirements of energy consumers.

No one can know, of course, whether we’ve hit the ultimate market bottom in our collective gloom. But this is a situation where being approximately right should work just fine. Know what you own and don’t  worry so much about what someone is offering for it at any given moment in time.

But do keep some dry powder in reserve for the next time short-term thinkers need to ditch their recent losers all at once almost at any price. Buffett’s not the only one with moody neighbors.