Imagine driving a car that responds to your commands with a two-year lag to better appreciate the joys of strategic planning in the oil tanker market.

If you’d like to take advantage of the nine-months-old rally in long-depressed charter rates, and assuming you have the needed nine figures of financing lined up, you can order your very own Very Large Crude Carrier — for delivery in the second half of 2017.

Now assume you’re driving that unresponsive car blindfolded, to simulate the reliability of everyone’s assumptions about the global economy in general and the shipping markets in particular two months hence, much less two years from now. And let’s throw in an ice-slicked roadway representing typical volatility in tanker rates. And then a cliff to recognize the consequences of making the wrong move at a wrong time.

As you might imagine, only the very good or very lucky manage to navigate these hazards successfully for very long. And you would have had to be very good, very lucky and a little mad to have bet heavily on a tanker turnaround amid the doldrums that prevailed until very recently.

Because that’s what it took to fully take advantage of today’s much improved fundamentals. Luckily, we only need a little skill and luck to participate in these brave souls’ good fortune, because investors burned by the sector repeatedly in the recent past have viewed its recovery with unwarranted skepticism.

For all their fears, the tanker market keeps gaining strength. Lower oil prices have stimulated additional Asian demand, without a significant letup in the output from U.S. shales. That oil in turn has displaced U.S. imports of Venezuelan and Nigerian crude, which must now make the much longer journey to Asia.

In addition, the current global glut has dramatically increased the volume of crude stored at sea, taking more tankers out of circulation based on figures The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday:

   

So matters have so far proceeded very much as we forecast when we first recommended investing in tankers at the end of January.

But this is a tricky sector to navigate even if you think you know where you’re going, as reflected in the fact that only one of our three picks has really paid off. Fortunately, Teekay Tankers (NYSE: TNK) has returned 31% since Feb. 2, more than offsetting our 10% loss on Capital Products Partners (NYSE: CPLP) over the same span. A third recommendation, Frontline (NYSE: FRO) is up 3%, not nearly enough given its inherent risk and volatility as well as the market’s fundamental strength.

Today we’re overhauling our tanker picks to take advantage of the operators that timed this market resurgence just right with discounted acquisitions and a high degree of exposure to rising spot rates.

EuroNav (NYSE: EURN) is among the leading global oil tanker operators with 27 VLCCs, 23 Suezmaxes, one V-Plus super-super-tanker and two FSOs (tankers turned into floating storage platforms.)

The company is headquartered in Belgium and staffed by Europeans; its tankers steam under the Belgian, French and Greek flags. The controlling Belgian family has a merchant shipping history dating back to the 19th century. It has long partnered with Greek shipping tycoon Peter Livanos, the sponsor of GasLog (NYSE: GLOG) among other shipping interests and scion of an even richer merchant clan.

Previously listed on Euronext, EuroNav staged a successful New York public offering in January, using the proceeds to cover some of the tab for the well-timed acquisition a year earlier of 15 VLCCs, at a bargain price of $980 million.

Earlier this month it swooped in again to buy four brand new VLCCs set to be launched from shipyards in the near term, with options on four more at a combined price approaching $800 million.

The fleet already on the water delivered net income of 55 cents per share in the first quarter, and seems likely to produce something similar in second-quarter results due July 30. The company recently pledged to pay out 80% of net annual after-tax income via dividends. Extrapolating the first quarter’s results over a full year, EuroNav might deliver $1.76 in dividends in 2015 (with an interim dividend in September and a final payment next May.) At the current share price, that works out to a prospective yield of nearly 12%.

Other things to like about EuroNav are its scale, participation in a top VLCC chartering pool and the fact that fleet management and operations are not subcontracted to a separate affiliate of the sponsor.

The stock has rallied 20% in the five months since its New York IPO, but has much further to go.  

We’re adding EuroNav to our Aggressive Portfolio. Buy EURN below $18.

DHT Holdings (NYSE: DHT) is a smaller crude tanker operator incorporated in the Marshall Islands, headquartered in Bermuda and managed by Norwegians from Oslo.

Like EuroNav, it manages and operates its ships in-house rather than outsourcing those functions to related parties.

Also like EuroNav,  DHT made a big acquisition on the cheap last year just before charter rates took off. In acquiring a Singapore-based owner of seven VLCCs for the bargain basement price of $325 million, DHT doubled the VLCC component of its fleet, which now includes the 14 VLCCs, two Suezmaxes and two Aframaxes. Six more VLCCs are on order for delivery before the end of 2016.

In the first quarter of 2015 DHT doubled its EBITDA from the fourth quarter of 2014 and comfortably exceeded its earnings from the entire prior year. It also tripled its quarterly dividend to 15 cents per share for a projected annual yield of 7.5%, and could have paid out double that based on its cash flow.

Despite the tremendous improvement in the fundamentals, the share price is up just 14% over the last year. Though DHT Holdings has less exposure to spot rates than EuroNav’s, like all tanker stocks it’s for aggressive investors only. Buy DHT below $10.

Scorpio Tankers (NYSE: STNG) ships refined fuels rather than crude, but this market too has seen impressive gains in rates since the big drop in the oil prices cranked up refinery output around the globe. The trade in fuel products is also benefiting from new refinery capacity in the Mideast and the associated exports, as well as the continued strength in US product exports to Latin America and Europe.

The average daily charter rate of Scorpio’s fleet increased 13% from the fourth quarter of 2014 in the first quarter of 2015, when the typical seasonal slowdown in product shipping rates simply didn’t materialize. Rates have continued to strengthen during the second quarter.

But what’s really driving Scorpio’s earnings power is its rapidly growing fleet, ordered almost in its entirety at the low prices during the deep slump before last year’s rebound. By now the fleet numbers 71 Scorpio-owned tankers less than a year old on average, along with an additional 19 vessels chartered from other owners. Seven more product tankers are scheduled to be delivered by the end of 2015 and another four next year.

With the hectic pace of deliveries expected to slacken, there will be more scope to increase a dividend currently yielding 4.9%. Based on net income reported in the first quarter, Scorpio could have doubled its latest quarterly payout of 12.5 cents per share.

The share price is up just 2% in the last year but 29% since the end of January. We’re adding Scorpio Tankers to the Aggressive Portfolio. Buy STNG below $12.

As for our prior tanker stock recommendations, we’re sticking with Capital Products Partners despite its disappointing performance of late because it remains exactly what we’ve said it was: a combination play on products tankers and the smaller crude carriers currently yielding almost 12% based on cash flow more than fully covered by the recent charter rates, with room for more. Buy CPLP below $10.

We also continue to like the earnings leverage at Teekay Tankers, which in the last quarter posted more than 19 times the net income required to cover its modest dividend, currently yielding 1.7%. But the company is more focused on paying down debt than boosting its payouts at this point, and we’re happy to take profits after the stock’s strong gains this spring. Sell half of your initial stake in TNK.

As for Frontline, it remains one of the cheapest names in shipping, but there are some increasingly apparent reasons for that. Its fleet is quite old, and is not growing. Meanwhile, management has just surrendered a lot of the upside by renegotiating its chartering deal with Ship Finance International (NYSE: SFL), a related party, in a way that will sap near-term cash flow while significantly diluting shareholders. Much better deals are now apparent in the tanker space. Sell FRO.