The iPath Select MLP ETN is the longest-running midstream-MLP exchange-traded note in the U.S. market, first sold in March 2013 and not scheduled to mature until March 18, 2043. The product has no operating business, no segment reporting, and no quarterly earnings call. What it has is a formula: a $25 principal amount that returns the closing volume-weighted-average level of the CIBC Atlas Select MLP Index divided by a fixed VWAP factor of 4.89920, plus a quarterly coupon equal to the accrued MLP distributions in the index less a 0.95% annual investor fee accrued daily, less a 0.125% holder-redemption charge if the note is cashed in before maturity. On August 13, 2026, the note closed at $36.34, up 24.8% over the trailing year, just $0.44 off its 52-week high of $36.78 set on July 23, and the index it tracks has been quietly re-engineered under the holders' feet. The quiet change matters more than the price.
Two structural shifts in the last eighteen months are doing the load-bearing work for the next investor. First, on April 11, 2025, the index doubled its quarterly rebalancing window from four trading days to eight, a mechanical change that increases the cost of index rebalancing and dilutes the realized index return versus a static basket over the same window. Second, the note is not an open-ended product. The outstanding note count has been 25,000,000 since November 2016 - the most recent prospectus supplement, dated February 11, 2026, lists no new issuances after the 8,000,000-note addition that year. There are no more paper-airplane tranches coming. The remaining $625 million of aggregate principal, plus 17 more years of compounding index exposure less 0.95% per year, is the whole investment case.
The most recent data point of consequence is the November 17, 2025 coupon: $0.39807 per note, an annualized yield of 5.50%. The prior November (2024) was $0.35114 at 4.91% annualized; the May 2025 print was $0.38014 at 5.32%. The coupon series, which stretches back to a $0.2648 print in May 2013 (3.99% annualized), tells the story of MLP distributions: they collapsed during the 2020 oil-price war and pandemic distribution cuts, peaked again in 2023 when midstream pricing power returned, and have now stabilized in the mid-single-digit annualized range. The $0.39807 figure is the cleanest read on the underlying cash yield; everything else is price.