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1945

It's likely not out of the goodness of their heart but rather coal's terrible performance. There is a bankruptcy filing every other week. This week alone the largest miner, Peabody, filed for bankruptcy.

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It's because the parlament told them to. Divesting in coal is a political move stemming from environmental concerns. At least officially, I think some parties supported the move because Norway doesn't export that much coal, and this could potentially increase gass and oil revenue.

The European oil/gas companies all support a carbon tax for the same reason. Coal is such an appallingly bad fuel that a carbon tax would kill it (even faster) and gas would replace it in large part.

Wouldn't that information already be priced in to the market?

Absolutely, but it by no means marks the bottom. Have a look at the last 5 years of KOL (ETF because I can't recall the coal futures symbol).

    > but it by no means marks the bottom

If you know with any degree of certainty at all which way an asset will move, you stand to make a gigantic amount of money. Everybody you have ever heard telling you which way an asset is moving is guessing just as much as people who tell you it's going to move the other way.

It isn't as much the fact that the asset will move, as the direction and the timeline that matters, as well as the availability of investment vehicles. If I'd wanted to profit on the knowledge that coal will go down, I'd have to short the stock which isn't free, so it is important for me to know on what time frame it will go down (if I knew it would go up, but not on what time frame, it would work just fine). Another example, I know lithium (the commodity) is going to go up, but 90% of the lithium market is dominated by 3 companies, each of which get less than 20% of their revenue from lithium mining, meaning I have no way of profiting from my knowledge.

Top tip: if you're willing to forgo the timeframe, it's possible to become a super-genius stock picker. I GUARANTEE you that the US stock market will crash!*

* Sometime, one day, in the future

There's no futures symbol because coal is inherently worth different values based on location. It's a solid, it doesn't spoil (sometimes it spontaneously combusts), you need a whole lot of it to do anything useful. These difficulties fragment the market. For example there are futures for: Australia coal, South Africa coal, Wyoming powder basin coal, Illinois basin coal, etc. It is transported by train or on a dry bulk ship.

Well, the same is roughly true of oil although it's a little harder to store and ship. There's at least two futures markets (Brent and WTI), various oil grades etc. People seem happier assigning a single "oil price" despite local variation.

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