Q:  Would you give a brief overview of the firm? A : SteelPath Advisors, which is based in Dallas, Texas, was established in 2004 as a money manager focused exclusively on energy infrastructure and investing primarily through the Master Limited Partnership asset class. Today, we have a family of mutual funds as well as privately available investment vehicles with total assets under management around $2.6 billion. We currently manage five mutual funds - the SteelPath MLP Alpha Fund, Income Fund, Select 40 Fund, Alpha Plus Fund, and MLP and Infrastructure Debt Fund. Q:  Why have you chosen Master Limited Partnerships as the underlying asset class in your portfolios? A : The Master Limited Partnership sector is attractive because it provides access to energy infrastructure companies benefitting from the rising production of natural gas, natural gas liquids and crude oil production in the U.S. which presents an attractive risk-reward proposition. Energy infrastructure companies generate predictable and growing cash flows, and, likewise, distributions. Since the MLP asset class is not widely covered by analysts, it has exhibited a high dispersion of return and presents opportunities for active management to capitalize on these inefficiencies. Moreover, MLPs have the potential to continue to generate strong returns for years to come. Q:  What are the core principles of your investment philosophy? A : Our belief is that the energy infrastructure space will continue to grow dramatically over the next decade, offering one of the most attractive risk-reward investment profiles. Thematically speaking, midstream focused MLPs provide direct access to the build-out of U.S. energy infrastructure over the next decade. Our belief is that pipeline and other midstream assets will provide real, long-term, and growing cash flows. We want to take advantage of technological breakthroughs and the production outlook taking place in the market by buying the energy infrastructure providers which will benefit from the increases in production volumes but without being overly exposed to the underlying commodity price. Q:  How do you build your investment process around this philosophy? A : We focus on companies with the strongest management teams and the most attractive investment opportunity sets in the midstream energy sector. These midstream assets consist of a dozen different industries or asset types. What we look for within the midstream asset class are companies offering services with fee or fee-like revenues. Some midstream providers have a fair amount of their margins exposed to commodity prices which is not our ideal investment choice. Essentially, we look at a sector that has yields of 6% and is probably growing those distributions at 5% to 7% for a number of years going forward. We screen potential portfolio holdings based on three primary metrics - Valuation Performance, Scenario Analysis, and Management Ranking. The way we go about it is we philosophically are of the opinion that an energy infrastructure company should comfortably survive a recession. Therefore, we run a scenario analysis for the company, a stress case in other words. If a potential candidate can survive a recessionary case, we would deem that as having passed our test. Next, we carry out a bottoms-up assessment by looking at each of the asset types owned by the MLP individually for an overall risk-adjusted valuation. That process allows us to get a very realistic sense of what the value of those assets are and what it is actually worth at the entity level. We take a very close look at the current asset footprint and what kind of opportunities the current footprint might be able to afford. All in all, we look at assets in an area that primarily has the best ability to win new business. Lastly, we prefer management teams that have demonstrated talent and an ability to acquire and deftly run the business. We monitor each company we follow very closely with the aid of financial models and frequent discussions with management. Q:  Could you give us some examples to highlight your process? A : Presently, one of our holdings is Enterprise Products Partners L.P., a North American midstream energy company, which is one of the largest names in the MLP space. With an asset footprint that stretches across South Texas, the company is well positioned to benefit from the robust production expectations of the Eagle Ford Shale. Hence Enterprise Products Partners has delivered and continues to generate a lot of growth opportunities via the Eagle Ford. Further, Enterprise is a dominant provider of natural gas liquids handling services. Consequently, their asset base has benefited hugely from the growing production of natural gas liquids. In addition, the company has become much more active even on the crude oil side by expanding the Seaway Pipeline along with Enbridge to help alleviate the bottlenecks from Cushing, Oklahoma. Enterprise is really benefiting across its asset base from all of these trends. Another example would be ONEOK Partners, L.P., a name we have owned heavily over the past year. The company is engaged in the gathering, processing, storage and transportation of natural gas and natural gas liquids in the United States. The company is a best-in-class MLP with a strong set of assets and geography that allows them to grow by largely leveraging the business footprint. Another name we have been adding to lately is NuStar Energy L.P., which is a company primarily engaged in the terminaling and storage of crude oil and petroleum products. They stretched out beyond their normal asset base by investing in asphalt refining in 2008. Although the investment made sense at the time, the fundamentals surrounding that investment changed materially and the stock has suffered over the last couple of years due to poor results within the segment. At this moment, we think it is worth taking a look at the stock because their asset footprint has allowed them to capture some growth opportunities around growing domestic crude oil production. NuStar Energy has a number of capital expenditure programs ongoing to help handle crude and a fairly extensive terminal expansion program. As the company continues to benefit from its growth platform, we believe the asphalt business impact on the overall business will continue to be less and less meaningful. Q:  How do you build your portfolio? What role does diversification play in your portfolio construction process? A : All of our funds focus on energy infrastructure MLPs. The SteelPath MLP Select 40 Fund is a portfolio of 40 energy infrastructure MLPs. No name in the portfolio is weighted more than 5%. The SteelPath MLP Alpha Fund and the SteelPath MLP Alpha Plus Fund are concentrated portfolios targeting 20 energy infrastructure MLPs that we believe have the strongest total return potential. The SteelPath MLP Income Fund is also a concentrated portfolio but focuses on those energy infrastructure MLPs that provide above average distribution yields. The SteelPath MLP and Infrastructure Debt Fund focuses on fixed income securities of energy infrastructure providers which we believe have very attractive credits. Portfolio weightings range between 4% and 8%. We try to diversify within the portfolios for potential systemic risks across business types, geographies, and even regulatory environment. The average annual portfolio turnover tends to be around 20%. Q:  When do you decide to sell a stock? A : Any sell decision is relative to our valuations and outlook. We will look for our thesis to play out or for something to prove our thesis wrong. We typically have fairly long holding periods as the fundamental bets we are making can take years to be realized. Q:  What risks do you focus on and how do you control them? A : Our risk control starts with a company level analysis and stress case testing of each individual company. As part of this process, we avoid investing in names that have excess commodity price exposure. As I mentioned, at the portfolio level, we try to achieve diversification for systemic exposures. Of course, we also look at price volatility though our buy and sell decisions are always fundamentally based. While excessive price volatility is not ignored, we have found that it often represents a buying opportunity rather than a signal that fundamentals have changed.