CSIC 2026 Panel: Dale Boyles On Low-Cost Production and Capital Discipline in Met Coal

The Capstone Student Investment Conference 2026 brought together students and professionals from around the country who are passionate about investing and finance. Dale Boyles, CFO from Warrior Met Coal, was one of the speakers at this year’s event.

A professor from Alabama University by background, Boyles started off with a notion of how value investors often avoid investing in cyclical companies. In contrast, there are investors with in-depth knowledge about cyclicals who find it an attractive ground for finding investment targets. The only prerequisite is to know potential issues and how to minimize them.

Identifying Warrior Met Coal As A Good Cyclical Story

The professor needed a cyclical investing example for the Advanced Value Investing Class that he teaches at the University of Alabama. Two years ago, he asked Arvind Sanger from Geosphere Capital Management, where he could send his students to do research about a specific company. Sanger pointed him out to Warrior Met Coal, which is a company based in Alabama, with mines twenty miles from the university.

Warrior Met Coal was founded in 2016 on the foundations of Walters Energy, which went bankrupt a year before. Two mines of metallurgical coal were the core of the operations. When looking at the coal market, it is essential to know the difference between the two types of coal. Metallurgical, which is more expensive, is used to make steel. The second is thermal coal, which is the basis for electricity production.

According to the company’s website “Warrior is a U.S.-based, environmentally, and socially minded supplier to the global steel industry. We are dedicated entirely to mining non-thermal steelmaking coal used as a critical component of steel production by metal manufacturers in Europe, South America, and Asia. Warrior is a large-scale, low-cost producer and exporter of premium quality steelmaking coal, operating highly efficient longwall operations in its underground mines based in Alabama.” With a market cap of approximately $4.5 billion,  Warrior Coal trades on the NYSE under the ticker, HCC.

What made the story more interesting is that the company lined up US$1 billion for investments in production expansion.