On Monday, EQM Midstream Partners, LP (EQM) announced yet another cost increase and delay to its targeted in-service date for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, or MVP.  The MVP project is by far the firm's most important growth opportunity, representing over two-thirds of EQM's current backlog and accounting for about 15% of firm-wide EBITDA upon completion. The successful completion of the MVP is critical to EQM's ability to maintain a healthy balance sheet and safe distribution. Continued delays and project cost increases have caused investors to worry about the firm's future financial health, causing EQM's dividend yield to double since early 2018 and sit at a lofty 10% today. 

In business for more than 100 years, Southern Company (SO) is a major regulated utility involved in selling electricity and distributing natural gas, primarily across the Southeastern U.S. The firm's eight vertically integrated electric and gas utilities serve customers across Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi.  Southern Company’s mix of business and service territories significantly changed after the company's 2016 acquisition of natural gas utility AGL Resources for $12 billion. AGL Resources owns more than 80,000 miles of pipelines and over a dozen storage facilities it uses to transport and distribute natural gas to businesses and households across Illinois, Georgia, Virginia, New Jersey, Florida, Tennessee, and Maryland.  

Omnicom (OMC) was formed in 1986 by the merger of three large advertising conglomerates. Today the firm is the world's second largest provider of advertising and marketing communication services to over 5,000 clients in more than 100 countries.  As a full-service agency, Omnicom provides numerous services, including designing ad campaigns, making the actual ads, determining where the ads should be placed and distributed, media buying, account management, public relations, consulting, and more. Most clients use ad agencies to perform all tasks of a campaign and prefer to conduct most of their business with just one or two agencies to streamline costs and efficiencies. Omnicom owns more than 1,500 advertising agencies that specialize in over 30 marketing disciplines, including branding, content [...]

Brookfield Infrastructure Partners L.P. (BIP) is one of the fastest growing and most diversified utilities in the world. In fact, the limited partnership (a corporate structure similar to that of a Master Limited Partnership) owns dozens of infrastructure assets located across five continents. Some examples of the partnership's assets include electrical transmission lines, railroads, toll roads, natural gas pipelines, global ports, telecom towers, data centers, water infrastructure, and fiber optic lines. 

Enbridge (ENB) investors have had a rough few years, with shares of North America's largest pipeline operator losing more than 20% since early 2015, including dividends. Unfortunately, investors received more bad news earlier this month. On June 3, the Minnesota Court of Appeals overturned approval for an important part of the firm's Line 3 Replacement Project, which was expected to account for about 50% of Enbridge's growth spending over the next few years. The court's decision comes after Enrbidge already announced a 1-year delay on the $6.8 billion project that was at the core of its plan to grow its dividend 10% in 2020 and self-fund long-term cash flow growth of 5% to 7% per year.  Shares of Enbridge have slumped nearly 7% since [...]

Phillips 66 (PSX) shares are down about 30% since their mid-2018 high. As a result, the stock's dividend yield now exceeds 4%, the highest level since Phillips 66 was spun off from ConocoPhillips (COP) in 2012.  Let's take a closer look at why the market has become pessimistic about Phillips 66 and assess why the stock appears to remain a reasonable income option for certain dividend investors to consider. 

Shares of Lowe's (LOW) have slumped more than 15% since the home improvement retailer released earnings on May 22, including the stock's worst-ever single-day loss of 12%. The market is notorious for overreacting to short-term results, even for quality dividend kings such as Lowe's. However, the world of retail is also evolving as e-commerce and trade wars could force a record number of store closings this year. Whenever one of my holdings experiences an unusually large decline, I like to investigate the situation to try and assess if I might be missing anything. Let's take a look at why the market was so disappointed with Lowe's and why the firm's long-term outlook appears to remain intact. 

Longtime tobacco investors know a thing or two about the challenges this industry can face. From regulatory pressures to costly settlement agreements, over the years income investors have had to stomach bouts of severe volatility. In fact, Altria's (MO) share price was nearly cut in half in the early 1990s when the Supreme Court ruled that smokers could seek damages against the cigarette industry. The country's major tobacco makers ultimately faced the largest class action lawsuit in U.S. history. Despite these periodic ups and downs, for decades Altria delivered double-digit annualized total returns and has increased its dividend 53 times in the last 49 years.  Many income investors fell in love, and Altria is not surprisingly one of the most popular holdings in [...]

In March 2019, I published a note reviewing Tanger's dividend safety. In my concluding remarks, I had stated the firm's dividend still looked safe, but investors needed to watch the performance of Tanger's tenants (emphasis added): Tanger's operating results have significantly deteriorated in recent years, driven largely by its exposure to troubled apparel retailers. While Tanger's dividend still appears reasonably safe based on the information we know today, investors considering the stock need to closely monitor the health of Tanger's tenants going forward.While additional retailer bankruptcies are already baked into management's 2019 guidance, it's hard to say whether this headwind is cyclical (a few over-leveraged and poorly managed apparel retailers) or secular (e-commerce and shifting consumer shopping preferences reducing the appeal [...]

Opioids are a class of drug that includes prescription pain relievers such as OxyContin and Vicodin, synthetic opioids such as fentanyl (similar to morphine but much more potent), and illegal drug heroin.  In 2017 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) declared a public health emergency to address the national opioid crisis. The HHS believes pharma companies caused a boom in opioid prescriptions throughout the 1990s and 2000s by reassuring healthcare providers that patients would not become addicted to these pain killers.  Increased prescriptions of opioid medications have resulted in an estimated 2.1 million people developing an opioid use disorder, and drug overdose deaths from opioids have skyrocketed in recent years to more than 45,000 in 2017 alone (though only [...]