Fade in for a moment on that classic scene in a classic movie: Obi-Wan Kenobi and his “Star Wars” pals get pulled over by thuggish imperial troopers in Mos Eisley, that “wretched hive of scum and villainy,” as old Ben describes it. Then, using the Force, he looks slyly at the threatening troopers and assures them, “these aren’t the carbon chains you’re looking for.”

How’s that?

Well, not exactly. That paraphrase of one of the more famous movie lines of all time serves to introduce an otherwise dull discussion of gas condensate in a Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co. monthly natural gas liquids (NGL) and midstream investment bulletin.

The force, in this case, is Bradley Olsen, director of midstream research for the energy investment and merchant banking firm.

Most of his reports have a similar moment here or there to leaven otherwise ponderous financial topics and mind-numbing tables of numbers. It’s a formula that Tudor Pickering uses elsewhere, a feature that attracted Olsen to the firm in the first place, he tells Midstream Business.

“When I was an investor before I joined Tudor, Pickering, I knew that they always have this approach where they try to be pithy and get straight to the point. I appreciated that, given the fact of how narrow our bandwidths are in the financial industry and how much stuff there is to consume,” he says.

That point made, Olsen continues onto another aspect of good humor appreciated by Shakespeare’s audiences— and consumers of good investment reports: Brevity is the soul of wit.

“I always appreciated that Tudor, Pickering’s research was, at most, a page or a page and-a-half long,” he adds. “It tells you what is important and what is impactful. So when I had the opportunity to join their research platform, that was an opportunity that I jumped at pretty quickly because I knew a lot of people read it and a lot of people have respect for their product.”

That formula—coupled with some expert number crunching—has worked well for the analyst. He’s received considerable recognition from his peers. Institutional Investor magazine named him a “Rising Star of Wall Street Research” in both its 2012 and 2013 surveys. He also was named the No. 1 U.S. stock picker in the 2013 Financial Times’ StarMine awards while The Wall Street Journal placed him second in the oil equipment, services and distribution category of its Best on the Street competition.

Not bad at all for a guy whose college major at Rice University was far afield from the finance background of most of his peers. Olsen’s studies centered on political science, philosophy and Slavic studies.

But he views that background as a strength that actually helps him do financial analysis.

“Part of it is just from the things that I did in college, writing philosophy papers,” he says of his work. “When it comes to valuing a stock, I think probably more important— in my humble opinion more important than knowing all the financial metrics—is understanding how the market perceives a stock and how the market perceives an industry. Because ultimately, the valuation of stocks and the access to capital of the companies, and the cost of capital really is determined how people think about the stocks.

“When I was in college and pursuing a philosophy degree, all my essays were more or less trying to persuade people to think about philosophical problems different ways,” he continues. “So here I am in research, and I’m trying to persuade our clients and investors to think about companies in a different way; trying to imagine the way a company might look if they do the right things over the next few years.”

He maintains “the creative side of things, and a lot more of the liberal arts side of things [go] into finance than a lot of people give credit for.” That includes provoking those chuckles from readers.

“Humor is kind of the sugar that makes the medicine go down,” Olsen says. “I’m talking about how infrastructure needs to be reconfigured to accommodate a massive new resource potential coming out of shale, which is really talking about the nitty-gritty, nuts-and-bolts infrastructure that’s being configured to accommodate something that’s very difficult to understand and very technologically complex thing to talk about.

“If you can kind of break things down to more simplistic parts and throw in some pop culture references or what have you, I think you really make an impression on investors if somebody’s actually reading your research. There’s a much higher chance of someone reading your research if you’re including something interesting—sprinkling in some humor rather than just writing drab reports full of tables and matter- of-fact statements about financial ratios and technology.”

Olsen admits there was a sizeable amount of good timing and luck to land in the fast-paced investment analysis field just as the midstream took off.

“Part of it was just the nature of the job market when I graduated,” he says. “Houston was growing, energy was doing well, and we had emerged from the recession of the early 2000s. It was a pretty good time to be looking for a job, as opposed to the 2009 to 2011 time frame when it was tougher. Part of it was just a lucky accident where financial firms were willing to look at folks with diverse backgrounds,” Olsen adds.

He was with UBS Investment Bank, Strome Investment Management and Eagle Global Advisors prior to joining Tudor, Pickering in 2011. He has proved one of the most popular speakers at Hart Energy conferences and returns this month to deliver a keynote address on Appalachia’s fast-changing midstream at the Marcellus-Utica Midstream conference in Pittsburgh.

Funny or not, a successful analyst “can’t be afraid to say what you think,” he says. “It’s a combination of taking your work seriously and triple-checking your facts. Once you feel really good about the research product that you’ve put together, take the extra time to make your presentations look appealing, that they’re easy to read. It’s really, I think, a combination of taking the fact part of the job seriously but then taking the presentation part of the job not as seriously.”

A new year can cause any investor to wax philosophical and Olsen is no exception. He sees some mixed signals for 2014 and the near beyond.

“I think the midstream has a lot of good things going on and a lot of positive prospects on the horizon, as well as a low interest-rate environment, which benefits infrastructure generally because it is a high, free cash-flowing asset class,” he says. “But frankly, I think I do have a little bit of a reputation as a pessimist—or doom and gloom guy. Really, what I’m trying to do is help investors understand that the infrastructure boom is not going to be endless, and there will be a natural cycle to it.”

From that perspective, he sees “2014 to be another good year for capital spending and investment in the industry. But one of the things I think sometimes analysts forget is every time a dollar of capital is invested, it’s being invested to solve a problem, and as we solve more problems, the amount of dollars that are needed to solve problems thereafter necessarily gets smaller and smaller,” he continues.

“And you would expect that multiples to go lower and yields go higher. Everyone hates to hear that, but the reason why 2010 through 2013 was such a great era for midstream is we had an unprecedented amount of work to do at a period when capital was really historically cheap,” Olsen says. That created “a very unique kind of perfect storm to be in, which is very good for stocks and very good for investors in these stocks.”

That creates some serious thinking despite the current optimism. “It’s just important to remember—as we work our way through a multiyear shale build-out—that we will not always have an endless number of projects and endless amounts of capital to throw at those projects, and investors need to be prepared for when that day comes.”

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