NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 1, 2006--Alerian Capital Management LLC announced today that, in conjunction with Standard & Poor's and the Coalition of Publicly Traded Partnerships, it has launched the Alerian MLP Index (AMZ), an innovative and powerful tool for MLP investors. The index will be disseminated by the New York Stock Exchange.
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REITs, Royalty Trusts, Energy Master Limited Partnerships, and Unit Trusts are part of the foundation of an income portfolio. [more]
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The Alerian MLP Index is a composite of the 50 most prominent energy master limited partnerships and will be calculated by Standard & Poor's using a float-adjusted market capitalization methodology. The index will be disseminated real-time on a price return basis (NYSE: AMZ). The corresponding total return index will be disseminated daily through ticker AMZX and will be available on Alerian's website www.alerian.com. In addition, Standard & Poor's has calculated 10 years of historical index data on both a price and total return basis. Alerian will also publish relevant constituent data points such as total market capitalization, and dividend yield daily.
"This index will bring focus and definition to a crucial link in the United States energy value chain," said Alerian managing partner Gabriel Hammond. "Both strong investment opportunities and a complementary need for capital exist in an emerging asset class that has delivered over 17% annualized total returns over the last decade."
"The NYSE is committed to empowering investors by facilitating innovative new benchmark indexes like the Alerian MLP Index," said Catherine R. Kinney, NYSE Group President and co-COO. "As investors become more familiar with the investment attributes of these infrastructure investments, this index will become a critical benchmark for this emerging asset class, the majority of which are listed on the NYSE."
"The sector's market capitalization has nearly doubled to $75 billion in the past two years and the analysts I talk to expect it to double again before the end of the decade," said Mary Lyman, Executive Director of the Coalition of Publicly Traded Partnerships. "The MLP sector today could be on a similar trajectory to REITS in the late 1980s and I believe that tremendous growth lies ahead given the strong need for new energy infrastructure investment and the continued migration of existing assets into the MLP structure. This benchmark will be tremendously helpful to investors trying to track the performance of these companies."
"The MLP sector is an emerging asset class, and Standard & Poor's Custom Index Group is pleased to be working with Alerian Capital Management to provide an independent, real-time index for this space," said Tim Eisenhauer, Senior Director and Head of S&P's Custom Index Group.
Master Limited Partnerships, or MLPs, are primarily engaged in the transportation, storage, or processing, of natural resources such as crude oil and natural gas. By confining their operations to these specific activities, they are able to trade on public securities exchanges exactly like the shares of a corporation, without entity level income taxation. More than two-thirds trade on the New York Stock Exchange. MLPs are regulated by the Securities Exchange Commission and must file 10-Ks, 10-Qs, and notices of material change like any publicly traded corporation and comply with the record keeping and disclosure requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
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REITs, Royalty Trusts, Energy Master Limited Partnerships, and Unit Trusts are part of the foundation of an income portfolio. [more]
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