Imagine a business throwing off a mostly tax-deferred 7% yield from not quite three-quarters of its cash earnings. Imagine its payout increased 13% in the last year.

Once upon a time, as in six months ago, that sounded like a pretty OK deal to many. And might again someday.

But for now it might as well be toxic waste, anonymously dumped into the poisoned wells called energy and income. I’m describing the MLP Profits portfolios, of course. That imaginary business is a composite of our recommendations’ vital signs, calculated after a thorough review of third-quarter earnings reports and the subsequent conference calls.

Our picks are, in fact, currently yielding 7% in the aggregate, with average distribution coverage of 1.36x, after increasing those payouts by an average of 13.4% over the last year.

All the standard disclaimers about lying statistics and detail-dwelling devils apply. And note that this benign view is from a rear-view mirror. The foggy future looks a lot less inviting.

It’s haunted by the specter of credit defaults, idle rigs, rusting pipes and a heavily leveraged industry with an imperative to build denied new capital. And that’s why that yield is still out there. Investors have not been slow to react to such premonitions of disaster.

That’s reinforced a negative feedback loop in which the unrelenting toll of lower equity prices seems only to confirm the worst-case scenario, which of course leads to more selling and still lower prices. It’s hard to argue with lower prices. As a football coach once observed, “You are what your record says you are.”

But records are subject to change and can prove highly misleading, as a more famous oracle has pointed out, writing of situations very much like this one.   

Those who are guided by facts and analysis rather than by premonitions and market moods should do better over the long haul.

And the facts say that while the shale revolution certainly sparked a building boom in pipelines and processing plants, these will be in use for many years to come as U.S. tight oil and tight gas prove less costly than alternatives like offshore drilling and oil sands mining.

Meanwhile, energy demand from 320 million people in the richest nation on Earth accounting for 20% of the global economy is not going away. In fact, it’s grown significantly and surprisingly in the last year as a direct consequence of cheaper fuel, and is expected to continue expanding. And an increasing proportion of all the terawatts of powers will need will come from power plants requiring a reliable supply of natural gas, just as all the gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel will come from refineries fed by crude pipelines, barges and trains and comparable takeaway capacity for their finished products, which will then need to be stored and distributed.

None of this is exactly news, but it’s certainly been overshadowed by all the idle talk about what might happen to this midstream if that big customer should go broke, or to that one if it can’t raise affordable capital. Obviously, nothing good would happen. But indefinitely extrapolating market dislocations even as the healing process has begun is not the road to prosperity.

The facts on the ground are a lot less dire, with heavy capital spending cuts by the drillers likely to cause only a modest dip in domestic energy production next year as a result of cost savings and technology improvements. And the global demand response to lower prices is downright bullish, even if it hasn’t mopped up the current oil and gas glut just yet.

But let’s move from generalities to specifics. Below are the yield and coverage statistics for all the portfolio picks, based with a couple of exceptions on third-quarter reports.               

Plains All American Pipeline (NYSE: PAA) is sticks out like a sore thumb in the Conservative portfolio both for its fat yield and skimpy coverage ratio. It also provides a useful reminder that such stats are snapshots in time requiring some context (and please see Portfolio Update for more of that.)    

Plains would like you to know that its coverage is actually 0.88x for the last nine months and is expected to improve to 0.94x for the current quarter. But that 6% distribution growth rate based on the latest raise is very likely to decline or even stall entirely next year.

Meanwhile, Spectra Energy’s (NYSE: SE) distributable cash flow, which seems particularly prone to seasonal fluctuation, provided coverage of 1.45x for the last nine months but only 0.89x for the third quarter. I’ve substituted the company’s reiterated guidance of 1.20x for all of 2015 as more representative.

The Growth basket lives up to its name in terms of distribution gains chalked up this year. More surprisingly, it hasn’t sacrificed much in the way of distribution coverage to accomplish that.

Even factoring out the two dividend payers with cash earnings more than twice the size of their modest payouts only drops the Growth Portfolio’s aggregate coverage ratio from 1.32 to a more-than-respectable 1.22.

The three refinery logistics providers have a lot to do with that; business has seldom been better for Delek Logistics Partners (NYSE: DKL), Holly Energy Partners (NYSE: HEP) or PBF Logistics (NYSE: PBFX) as they piggyback on their sponsors’ growth.

Meanwhile, Marcellus gas gatherers EQT Midstream (NYSE: EQM) and Antero Midstream (NYSE: AM) offer less yield, strong coverage and a clear path to very strong growth. EQM’s sponsor, EQT (NYSE: EQT) has one of the strongest balance sheets in the industry and possibly the best drilling rock in the Marcellus and Utica cores. AM is an affiliate of Antero Resources (NYSE: AR), whose $2.8 billion hedge book will allow it to reap nearly twice the current market price from the entirety of next year’s planned gas output.

Even the recommendations that have suffered dramatic market hits and are carrying double-digit yields as a result, notably Archrock Partners (NYSE: APLP), DCP Midstream Partners (NYSE: DPM), Global Partners (NYSE: GLP) and Targa Resources Partners (NYSE: NGLS) have retained a decent coverage cushion.

Among the laggards, Williams (NYSE: WMB) and MarkWest Energy Partners (NYSE: MWE) will soon be absorbed in mergers, while Kinder Morgan (NYSE: KMI) is paying the price for juicing dividend growth after absorbing its affiliated MLPs last year. Energy Transfer Partners (NYSE: ETP) is at a 0.97x coverage year-to-date.

The Aggressive Portfolio is such an oddball mix of tankers, pipelines, asset managers and amusement parks, with several of the tanker operators delivering double-digit yields fully backed by industry and market trends but getting very little credit for it in the market.

Navios Maritime Partners (NYSE: NMM), SunEdison (NYSE: SUNE) and KKR (NYSE: KKR) haven’t performed as hoped and even at current humbling levels present too much risk to remain recommended.

But on the whole, most recommendations are faring much better on all the important metrics than bearish market sentiment might lead you to believe. That wouldn’t necessarily remain the case if unsustainably low energy prices were to last for several more years. But there is every indication that they won’t.