Two consecutive months of coal burn going up, but Craft urges caution

摘要

The current short-term outlook for the coal industry is like one of those open-ended weather forecasts most of the country gets most of the time: Mostly cloudy with a 50% chance of storms. On one hand it doesn’t sound all that good, but like my dad used to say, “That’s a 50% chance it’s not going to storm.” That was sort of the forecast Joe Craft and the guys at Alliance Resource Partners were making Monday during the company’s second-quarter earnings call. Are things looking better than they were just a couple of months ago? They are.