I don’t like closed-end MLP funds because they owe income tax on the distributions received, negating the principal advantage of the MLP tax structure. That’s a significant tax leakage whether the distributions go into an IRA or a taxable account. Many such funds attempt to make up for that by using leverage, but of course that increases the risk and imposes an additional interest expense on the fund investors. You’d be much better off owning the individual MLPs, and KMR and EEQ are two MLP affiliates that receive dividends from their parents via additional shares not subject to immediate income taxation or the unrelated business income tax. It’s true that closed-end MLP funds offer diversification benefits, but most subscribers holding multiple individual MLPs don’t get much additional benefit from holding a fund, and the same diversificarion is available from exchnage-traded notes that don’t suffer from the same tax leakage, The ETN I currently prefer, MLPI, has outerperformed KYE and TYG by roughly 20 and 10 percentage points, respectively, over the last two years. Of course, the ETN carries credit risk, so if you were worried about Credit Suisse going bust (I’m knot) then you wouldn’t want to own their ETNs.