The MLP rally, or perhaps just the first stage of one, ended on March 7 after a romp of 35% in under four weeks. Since then, the sector has traded sideways and drawn considerably less attention than it had while imploding.

“Nobody gives a [bleep] about MLPs right now,” an industry insider observed earlier this week, and that weary cold shoulder from the hot money crowd sounds to me like a pretty good omen.

It hasn’t hurt, of course, to have oil prices continue inching up amid a flurry of predictions that the current supply glut will be worked off sometime around the end of the year.

In other signs of healing, some MLPs have sold equity again and most continue to increase distributions at the pre-crisis pace.

Our New Buys this month recommends an Appalachian midstream player that went public just as sentiment among energy investors curdled, and which is much cheaper now despite putting up solid operational and financial results over the last year.

Best Buys stacks up one of the biggest drags on our portfolios’ first-quarter performance against industry comparables, and concludes that there is no better bargain out there.

In Focus tries to reconcile the very real long-term cost of depreciation with industry assertions that this non-cash expense is of little consequence. My take is that the value of accounting half-truths depends on how we use them,

Portfolio Update tallies the first-quarter performance of our picks, which was a little better than the average for MLPs, on average, even after factoring in too many outsized losers. Some can and will do much better than what they have this winter; a couple that likely won’t have already been jettisoned.

I’ve started combing our recommendations’ recently filed annual reports for key financials that will be presented next month as part of our annual Portfolio Checkup. The early returns look solid as the sector deleverages, benefiting from the projects financed in recent years while cutting back on borrowing and equity issuance.

We could badly use a few more boring months of diminished trading volatility and gradually improving fundamentals. Then we might really have something to be excited about.

Portfolio Update

• Capital Products Partners upgraded to Buy below $4 in Aggressive Portfolio
• CONE Midstream Partners (NYSE: CNNX) added to the Growth Portfolio as #8 Best Buy below $17
• Growth pick Energy Transfer Equity (NYSE: ETE) ranked as 1 Best Buy below $15
• EuroNav (NYSE: EURN) upgraded to Buy below $13 in Aggressive Portfolio