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Martin Tillier

Martin Tillier

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Buying Coal Stocks Is Still Too Risky: Shorting This One Isn’t

I have been contributing here for about six months and in that time I have covered most aspects of the energy markets, with one glaring exception. Not once have I mentioned coal. There is a good reason for that. I regard coal stocks as inherently too risky and, without wishing to be too blunt, I wouldn’t buy them with somebody else’s money, let alone my own.

Risk is a funny thing, or rather our perception of it is. I well remember sitting in a restaurant with a good friend who was horrified by my choice of tuna as an entrée. “Don’t you know,” he gasped “You can get poisoned by that stuff. I wouldn’t take that risk.” During the evening he drank four or five glasses of wine, then climbed into his car and drove home. Now that is taking a risk!

When it comes to investing, too, our perception of risk is often colored by headlines and conventional wisdom. We have been taught for years that volatility is synonymous with risk, but that to me is too simplistic. When trading and investing we should look at the upside to owning a stock as well as the downside. It is the risk/reward ratio that counts, not the risk itself as, by the judicious and disciplined use of stop-losses, downside risk can be limited. In the case of most coal stocks the potential upside is, to say the least, minimal, leaving us with a lot of downside risk and not much else.

I am not predicting the death of coal. People have been doing that for…




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