Energy stocks are showing real signs 2019 will be the year they break out of a nearly five-year slump.

Both the S&P 500 Energy Index and the Alerian MLP Index posted total returns in the low teens for the first two months of 2019. That’s energy stocks’ best start to a calendar year since 2013, when those two indexes finished up 25 percent and 27.6 percent, respectively, en route to making all-time highs.

Benchmark WTI Cushing crude started 2013 in the low $90s per barrel, briefly broke down to the mid-$80s in April, then hit a high of $110 plus in late August before closing the year right around $100. Henry Hub gas, meanwhile, traded between $4 and $5 per thousand cubic foot for most of the year.

Those prices are a far cry from where we are now. But the trajectory of the commodities themselves has been generally encouraging in recent months. So is the fact that energy midstream master limited partnerships weren’t left out of this uptrend, as they were when oil rallied last year.

Dividend investors can certainly be forgiven for distrusting energy companies’ dividends.

We launched the Energy and Income Advisor Endangered Dividends List on June 30. Of the original list of 16 names, only four have managed to avoid a dividend cut since. Of the dozen or so we’ve added to the list more recently, fewer than half have managed to hold up. And all 15 companies currently on the EDL are at high risk of making reductions sometime in the next 6 to 9 months, if not eliminating distributions entirely.

All of these cuts are, of course, on top of dozens more through the first half of 2018, dating back to when oil prices first broke under $100 a barrel back in 2014. And it doesn’t help that the latest round has come with benchmark West Texas Intermediate Crude oil prices still nearly twice their early 2016 lows.

The carnage has understandably made many skeptical that any energy company’s dividend is secure, no matter how good numbers and guidance get. Kinder Morgan Inc (NYSE: KMI), for example, earlier this month announced strong fourth quarter operating numbers, raised guidance and affirmed a 25 percent dividend increase for April. Its shares, however, managed only a small surge, which they’ve since given up.

Skepticism is even more clearly etched in prices of the three dozen or so master limited partnerships we track that currently yield 10 percent or more. Sure, some of them are headed for dividend cuts, with EDL companies at the greatest risk. But other high yield companies appear to have fallen despite all indications they’re still strong on the inside.

This issue, we highlight high yielders still likely to hold their payouts this year and recover their lost ground. Timing will depend squarely on what happens to oil and natural gas prices. The Alerian Index, for example, has closely followed oil prices, though recently outperforming the commodity.