Macquarie Makes Global Infrastructure Mark

The top three holdings are Canada's Pembina Pipeline Income Pifu, Transurban Group TSL and (MMP Quote)Magellan Midstream Par.

Macquarie Global Infrastructure paid out 38 cents a share in distributions last year and has paid out $1.17 through Nov. 38 of this year. To date, all of the distributions have been dividends; the fund has not yet declared any capital gains distributions. To get a rough idea of what the fund can yield, we divide the year-to-date distribution of $1.17 by the fund's current price of $27.18 and arrive at a 4.3%. By way of comparison, the average yield on the assets in the fund's portfolio is a healthy 6.26%.

The fund's expense ratio of 3.68 ratio is high, but this is to be expected with global funds that typically have a higher cost structure than domestic focused funds. And so far, the returns have more than made up for it.

Macquarie Global Infrastructure's low turnover of 12.17 makes it well suited for the buy-and-hold investors who want long-term exposure to utilities.

As of Nov. 28, it was trading at an attractive discount of 5.85% to its net asset value of $28.36.

One potential risk is that the fund's holdings are fairly concentrated: 55% of assets are in the top 10 holdings. This means that its performance is more vulnerable to the fortunes of a few individual stocks.

And like many closed-end funds, Macquarie Global Infrastructure invests with borrowed money. It has a commercial-paper conduit in place that allows it to raise money to purchase more stock than it could with money from shareholders. Taking this borrowed money into account, it has 130.9% of assets in stocks.