Out Fox The $treet

After another weak earnings report, it appears that Arch Coal ( NYSE: ACI     ) may never regain momentum. The coal miner can't seem to catch a break with domestic thermal coal demand improving, but the high dollar metallurgical coal market plunging to new lows. Arch Coal remains one of the largest domestic coal producers with a target of selling at least 130 million tons during 2014. Unfortunately, a rebound in one segment is being met by a loss in another segment. The company is suffering substantial losses, bringing up doubts of whether a strong enough rebound will occur. Read the full article here . Disclosure: Long ANR. Please review the disclaimer page for more details. 

he recent floods in the state of Queensland in Australia have ravaged the operations of coal mines, specifically those that mine coking coal. Queensland produces roughly 90% of the coking coal in Australia, so that's a huge impact to the global trade of this commodity. According to this report from  Mining Weekly ,  some of the flooded mines, especially open pit mines, could be off line for up to 6 months. It's still early in the process, but it'll be interesting to see how this will play out on demand and pricing. See the rest of the article at Seeking Alpha . 

According to the WSJ , Massey Energy (MEE) is reviewing a buyout offer from Alpha Natural Resources (ANR). Oddly though the title of the article currently says Arch Coal (ACI) instead of ANR. For the last couple of weeks, its been speculated that MEE was on the auction block. MEE is a major holding of our Opportunistic and Growth portfolios since the stock swooned down to the $30 area following the mine explosion in April. The stock is up roughly 12% to $47 providing for a major gain already so any large premium over this level would be sweet. Unfortunately, these portfolios are also heavily invested in ANR so a buyout by them would likely dilute the gain as their stock will possibly drop similar to todays reaction where MEEs gain has doubled ANRs loss. Still very positive, but naturally we'd prefer another suitor over ANR. Since ANR has a lot of similarities to MEE especially the US met coal production and reserves and outside buyer would also drive up their price. Oh well, ...