In a nutshell: a huge advance and now what appears to be a crash (~ -50%) is currently in progress.
The bigger picture is how indicative this compressed boom-bust story is of the future of the surge in US inflation. Lumber is showing us how easy it is for the market to reject ridiculous prices. What's unclear is how low lumber, and other goods/commoditiies that have seen similar booms, can go.
I know someone who picks up loads from sawmills and it turns out there was no lumber shortage. They were just holding back on shipments to drive up prices taking advantage of the inflation trend.
You've been breaking the site guidelines badly enough and repeatedly enough that I've banned this account.
I appreciate that you did better with this one than with the previous account we banned, but even so the pattern with this one is not acceptable and commenters to HN need to do better than this. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us a reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
The is from May; prices have fallen quite a bit off peaks I hear and some speculators are now trapped under big loads ordered 2 months ago now being delivered.
There's "we bought a sawmill!" ads here in the rural lands now for fresh sawn green pine and oak; which isn't "lumber" yet in any useful sense. I've seen porches being built that won't last the summer.
Yeah, its a shame the article left off what is probably one of the biggest reasons for the price spike. Speculation. 4x price spikes in a relatively stable commodity aren't explained by simple supply/demand economic factors. The article is a couple of months old and we can now see the speculative bubble unwinding.
Down 8% two days ago. Down over 50% from the peak. No doubt prices will remain above trend for a while, but 4X is just another case of speculative nonsense over-amplifying the realities.
Is it speculation or is it hedging? We weren't speculating on toilet paper when it was massively out of supply early in the pandemic. Rather, there was a demand shock, and maybe a bit of a supply shock too. If TP's spot price had been meaningfully allowed to float, I have no doubt that it would have traded at 4x its long term average, even if you had factored in only consumer demand.
All that is to say I don't see compelling evidence here that speculation is the cause of the problem. I can as easily see more benign explanations.
Is there a meaningful difference between speculation and hedging - besides the intent to take delivery? People hedging with the intent to take delivery are simply speculating that the price would go up. Maybe it makes more sense to separate out along those lines instead.
Yes, I think there is. Speculation is trading activity with the intent to profit from a change in price. Hedging -- in the sense I'm talking about -- is buying an asset to guard against a change in price or shortage. You can certainly see them as similar things, and in some sense they are, but I think there would be broad agreement that this sort of hedging does not deserve the same scorn that some have for speculators.
Even if the activity is exactly the same, most people tend to feel differently about an activity because of its motivation. The motivation to obtain large profits is held in much less respect than the motivation to guard against personal shortage. Also, corporate behaviors in general get a lower prior amount of esteem than individual and household level behaviors.
We can definitely talk about whether people ought to view these things differently, but there is little question as to whether they currently do.
Speculation is about taking a risk to make a potential gain, while hedging is about reducing risk. Someone buying lumber futures as a hedge really doesn't want lumber prices to go up - it's just an insurance protection in case it does, not a way to make profit.
Whether you take delivery or not isn't exactly the point, since a speculator could take delivery of something then resell it for profit. I think some people did that for TP and masks...
Sorry, to be clear, I never claimed that speculation was nonexistent. I'm just saying that I haven't seen evidence that it was the main driver of the cost changes, outside of bare assertions.
I'm keeping fingers crossed copper will fall back down. I was pricing out some heavy gauge wire last year for a project and passed because I wasn't ready to work on it. Now I'm kicking myself for not pulling the trigger.
Just from a technical perspective, the 1Y chart on that page shows some real promise, for example higher highs and higher lows on multiple time scales.
I'm not terribly interested in lumber but if you want a good price, with that chart it seems like now may be a great time to buy given the current low. It may also be the last time at that price level for a while. (No promises, just what I'd speculate based on the chart)
Edit: To clarify, this comment is mostly registering my surprise. I see no cabal speculation activity, just a big invite for your neighbor to buy some for their active retirement fund at these levels. Think about that as another variable.
I can’t quite tell if you’re either lampshading/mocking speculator thinking or if this is sincere. But the thinking behind the above comment largely seems to be the source of all the problems.
Is this thinking _really_ the source of all the problems?
I have to admit I expected to see something idiotic when I clicked through to the link! Like, "pshah, pure speculation!" but instead I am looking at a chart that any broker worth their salt, even a conservative one, might green-light for a client right now, today. So I'm sharing what I'm seeing and no, this doesn't perfectly fit a speculation-cabal mindset.
IOW: This is clearly a price level where your non-cabal types will happily buy in and take a reasonable profit later.
For all we know, the really evil ones could have brought it down to this level. So are we going to pin the blame on those millions of people attempting to prepare for a retirement?
And there's nothing wrong with sharing another perspective, is there, really?
Nobody's even proven, or shown how speculation is the source of the problem. It's just expected that we simply believe that? Speculation could be a side effect for all we really know.
I've been trading technicals for years, and a huge lesson you learn is that everybody has a "why", and everybody has a story, but it always comes late. You then turn around and see the same patterns in nature and start to realize: "Why" can be a terribly unhelpful and misleading direction to take your solutions-oriented mindset.
If you want to cut down on speculation, IMO you need to look into things critically, deeply, and everybody's "why" ought to be first. Was it _really_ speculation? Or are speculators just watching natural patterns unfold and joining the ride?
Metaphorically: Even if it feels amazing to pin the blame on the fox who got into the hen house, do you want to go after every fox in the forest, or maybe understand the fox better--draw the foxes around to another location, or design a hen house with doors on it?
I visited the link with an open mind. But I have experience with charts like that and I can tell you, people will buy here, and the price will very likely go up again. I just think that we can do better, creatively if we want to "solve" the greater lumber issue.
Nope, not price anchoring. And how do you effectively prove a negative anyway...I see people profiting from models that were long considered voodoo. Always manage risk.
> fairly clearly speculation is the source of much of this
That's a hand wave. You don't want to open your mind and look at different perspectives, fine. But let's not ever think of such a position as a high-quality one.
plywood at my local home depot is still very much at its highest price ever when I checked last week ($135 for a 1-1/8" 4x8 sheet of t&g subfloor)
> There's "we bought a sawmill!" ads here in the rural lands now for fresh sawn green pine and oak; which isn't "lumber" yet in any useful sense. I've seen porches being built that won't last the summer.
The allegedly "kiln dried lumber" home depot has been selling has been criminally wet throughout the last year too. Not only have people been paying through the nose for the stuff, it's been nowhere near ready to use. I had to let boards I bought for building gambrel rafters sit for a month on my covered deck before attempting to cut them to the pattern. And even after that, a bunch of them shrunk another 1/4" from the pattern in the subsequent month of waiting for me to install. Infuriating to pay so much for stuff that isn't even top quality and ready to go. I also had to throw a few away from splitting and twisting during the drying process...
KD-HT is a pretty standardized, commodity product. I used to work at a lumber yard on their Heat Treat process.
I am pretty sure that the lumber I see at Home Depot are the same lumber that I use to work on. It's not like they have their own mills and ovens. They buy the same commodity lumber like everyone else.
TBH, the lumber yard I worked at you to flood. We would have bundled stacks of lumber float all across the yard. We can pretty much take them the next day and ship them to a construction site. KD-HT lumber is pretty good like that.
Now, most of our large customers just have a reasonable expectation of the product. It's wood. It's gonna warp. It's gonna split. It's like most things like fresh fruits, or meat, or leather. There is a lot of variability.
That is not a recent thing. Home Depot wood has been dripping wet for many years. It's routine to put a screw into it and have water running past the head as you tighten it. I typically buy 50-100% more than I expect to use on the assumption that a good chunk of it will warp as it dries and become useless.
Most of my big diy home construction projects happened to overlap with the pandemic, and when I described the wet lumber problems to a local with more building experience he was so confident their lumber was properly kiln dried he attacked my ability to measure and cut properly...
I'm not sure if I should feel better or worse about the situation knowing home depot has been doing this long before the pandemic.
That wood from Stimson is the worst ever. I don't think you can buy worse. I've used all sorts in my life and HD consistently has lumber that cannot even be used to start fires until you dry it.
Plywood is fine, but if you need anything you build to last, buy pressure treated at HD, or buy plain lumber somewhere else.
(I bought some 2x4s for a non-permanent project during the pandemic. It was so soft and wet that when I fired a railgun into one of the pieces, the nail went all the way through. That should not happen)
Whenever I go to Lowes, I always like to go by the lumber section (even when I'm not there for lumber) just to see how warped the dimensional lumber is. It's always a depressing experience.
Oddly the good stuff wasn't much affected. I was making a work bench and picked up a 4x8 of red oak plywood for under $60 in May. Not what I would normally use but half the price.
Yeah, this is strange, especially as red oak plywood is mostly the same thing as normal plywood, the red oak is just a thin veneer on the face. I've been buying cherry lumber recently, and they went from something like $4.50/bf to $6.50/bf here. Significant increase, but not 3-fold.
Now that I think of it, it kinda makes sense: it's not the timber that's gotten more expensive, but the service of milling it. For products from relatively more expensive hardwood timber, milling costs constitute smaller fraction of the final cost, so even if milling costs triple, the final product might only go by 50%.
It's more than just that. You can see weird price changes like this because of the limits of substitution.
Imagine you've got a project to build a bookcase. You're using cheaper normal plywood for hidden structural parts and nicer but more expensive red plywood for the stuff people will see. You price the whole thing out.
Then the price of wood skyrockets. To keep the price of the whole project under control, you start cutting costs. You use more of the cheaper plywood for the whole project and decide to skimp on the red oak.
Scale that across many projects and you get a paradoxical result where the cheapest goods in a category go up in price while the better goods don't, because people are subbing out the "cheap" stuff for the good stuff.
FWIW, substitutability is a hard problem with algorithmic pricing, even for relatively stable inventory categories like big box construction retail.
I'd guess (with some insider knowledge) that (1) there wasn't any prebuilt link to adjust substitute pricing & (2) Depot didn't care enough to adjust pricing.
Both Depot and Lowes are in it for volume and long-term, which is why they don't do things like spike generator prices after hurricanes.
A friend of mine in CT has problem now in the hardwood supply chain. The issue is that the kiln drying backlog has now caught up with hardwoods as many kilns are full of fir and pine. The supplies of paint grade poplar and soft maple are running quite low now.
I was in Home Depot a couple of days ago (in Western Massachusetts). Crappy 19/32 CDX was $85 for a 4x8 sheet. Sitting right next to it was 3/4" oak veneer at $60. I think it would be pretty funny to sheath a house in sort of cabinet grade plywood (it is 7 ply Purebond which usually has a couple of voids per sheet).
Those are definitely not substitutable. In addition to the difference in glues the peer comment notes (the oak plywood will likely delaminate if exposed to moisture), you need to sheathe a house in a product rated for that use. That oak veneer doesn't have a span rating stamped on it, so any inspector would fail you.
Yeah, prices are still ridiculous. Apparently it takes a couple months for the aforementioned price drops in futures to trickle down. If HD bought it for 100, they ain't gonna sell it for 50 regardless of what sawmills are doing(unless of course forced to with overstock and such).
You two are saying the same thing. If they won't sell due to an uncompetitively high price, then they'll have overstock. Then they'll be "forced to" sell lower.
I’m saying they’ll do it even if they’re just normally (or even partially) stocked with material. They know their customers are cross-shopping them with other stores, they need to be competitive, and they don’t want to lose the rest of the order lines nor train customers that they’re not competitively priced.
I consider that covered under 'and such' but, it's not so simple.
There's about four layers between the chainsaw and the consumer. So HD, Lowes, etc all exist at layer 4, sometimes 3 and 4. None of them are going to price cut below what they paid. Call it a gentleman's agreement, or common sense.
What you'll most likely see is buying from layer 3 at say, 50, and selling both 100 and 50 dollar wood together at 75.
It was clearly a sawmill issue. Lumber was expensive but timber was cheap.
I don't know how to calculate if more sawmills are needed (permanent backlog) or if it's a temporary backlog. I figure that speculation is for the commodity traders and maybe some stock / sawmill speculators.
In practice, guess and check may scale better? But I've also been to towns where the sawmill shut down and destroyed the local economy, so guess and check may be immoral (even if it's somewhat profitable)
This is an easy one to calcucate, you don't even need to do real math. There's a spike in consumer demand due to COVID. People are pouring money into their houses rather than external entertainment and travel. That's a temporary change.
Between the stimulus checks, unemployment checks, and other such policies... as well as the Fed's continued reliance upon an expanded balance sheet (kinda sorta like QE), there's worries that the increased prices are at least partially caused by inflation.
If the inflation-dudes are right, then at least part of the price increase is permanent. That's why the calculations are necessary: because many people are making many different arguments about the future of this current economy.
The one who can predict the future will make money of course.
It seems like the spectacular boom in home renovation will have to lead to an eventual bust at some point - people generally don't want to do a major renovation that often.
That said, it seems like the huge spike in building materials did a very good thing by making many people postpone renovations until prices come down, which should help smooth out the peak-to-trough chart of building construction.
> There's "we bought a sawmill!" ads here in the rural lands now for fresh sawn green pine and oak; which isn't "lumber" yet in any useful sense. I've seen porches being built that won't last the summer.
I'm curious why this is. Is it the drying stage, or something else?
You can build out of green lumber. But, as wood dries it will twist, warp, and crack. If you happen to live somewhere humid building with green wood is an invitation for fungal rot. For both durability and square building it is better to dry the wood first.
Green white oak, especially, can do some cool stuff. I imagine you could do a porch with lap built and grain matched construction and get a "tensegrity" bonus as stuff dried; but ive never seen that trick done with anything more complicated or smaller than house siding.
Wouldn't work well at all for any construction that isn't using mortise and tenon or some other type of friction fit construction. Can be disastrous for traditional construction where pieces are butted up together and nailed.
Wood for construction needs to reach an equilibrium moisture point with the outdoor air after its cut.
If its dried outside, it takes months to years to dry, depending on the humidity level and temperature.
The wood is dried because it makes it lighter, and the shrinkage and swelling has already played out during the drying process... instead of when its in place!
It’s fascinating how consistently the shortage and glut cycle plays out across a diverse range of commodities. The common elements seem to be an undifferentiated product and some delay in the production cycle. The length of shortage and glut depends on the length of delay, which is exacerbated if production depends on fixed assets that take a long time to build and a long time to wear down (e.g. ships).
My FiL works in the industry on large projects, and the word from suppliers is that in Jan, prices should drop 50% from where ever Dec ends up, as there is going to be a ton of supply.
Just today I was listening to a German podcast on this topic ("Warum Bauholz zurzeit knapp und teuer ist") [1]. Main explanation of it having become so expensive in Germany as well is the high demand in the US, China and in Germany itself. Russia has set an export ban on wood, so China is buying more from Germany.
Germany currently has a surplus of wood, yet the prices aren't low. Sawmills are the main benefactors of the current situation, they're processing wood like never before, also because last year a lot of trees were affected by beetles, fungi, storms and the like. So this lower quality wood (which is perfectly fine to use) has been mainly exported. 40% of the processed wood is exported.
Sawmills are buying the trees for cheap due to the surplus that the forest owners (around 96% of the owners own less than 20 ha) are saying that they're now considering to stop selling wood and wait for the fall or next year if they can handle it.
Then again, if they stop selling the wood, the state- or community-owned forest owners (around half of the German forests are privately owned, the other half by the state or communities) might not be able to to pay for the machinery and workers which usually work the entire year around. Also private owners have got together and share machinery and personell which needs to get payed during the entire year. So to some degree they are forced to continue cutting down trees to sell them.
"Because the storm occurred with very little warning, many factories weren’t able to shut down properly, resulting in polymers congealing and solidifying in the equipment"
Wow, I'm surprised there weren't back-up generators if power failure means machine destruction.
The shortage isn't that much a result from the pandemic and people doing more DIY-projects, but because the US and China (and also Germany, if we talk about local wood) are building a lot of houses. China buys more wood from Germany now that Russia has set an export ban on wood. The only odd thing which I see is that the export ban is supposed to start in January 2022 [1] so I don't understand why China is already starting to buy more wood from Germany.
Those DIY projects, increase in home improvement, and increase in housing demand has been due to the changes in people's consumption patterns because of changes in people's work patterns due to the pandemic.
Also, lumber is traded globally. US buyers have been importing more lumber from Europe during COVID than before. I guess that means that the demand has been higher in the US.
It was sad to hear the larger construction companies using their buying power to purchase all available stock and store in their warehouses with no assigned jobs. They were pushing smaller construction companies to the wall when they couldn't access any stock for jobs they actually had on.
If you are a construction company and anticipate a possible/likely disruption in one of your critical raw materials and have the funds to protect your business, what else would you do? It doesn’t sound predatory; rather it sounds eminently sensible.
Compounding these issues was the Texas Ice Storm in February, which knocked out roughly 80% of US polymer production. Because the storm occurred with very little warning, many factories weren’t able to shut down properly, resulting in polymers congealing and solidifying in the equipment.
I'm surprised it's not cost effective to have backup generators to power critical equipment long enough for a graceful shutdown if an ungraceful shutdown can keep a plant offline for a month or longer.
Great summary and analysis. The context on the cracker shutdowns in February makes it all the more clear. This processing bottleneck has been playing out across the commodities sphere as the 2nd order impacts from COVID play out.
Office rents will probably take a hit in the new normal but I’m guessing everyone now just waits to see what happens.
What’s clear is that many of us with two people who will work from home a lot the coming years have at least one room too few and are building extensions. My builder bought a $25k load of materials and left it on my lawn before summer for an extension they’ll build in August, because their supplier advertised that prices would increase 50% in July.
No-one's really sure what will happen to office space (and even cafes/bars/etc. that relied on office workers for their clientele) after this. Anecdotally my employer has already closed what was previously their main building.
If we're permanently in a more work-from-home world then yes, we'll eventually see demand for remodelling and demolition of downtown offices, though only once the economy and population have picked up enough that there's demand to use the space for something - blighted buildings from the last recession sitting idle for years is a thing that happens. The suburban business parks I can imagine just decaying forever, like low-end out-of-town malls were doing pre-pandemic - there's no other use for them and the land just isn't valuable enough.
i wish this was a demand and supply thing but I am really afraid this is going to turn out to be inflation. And it’s actually all the prices that are going up - we’re just talking about wood because we have a good narrative around it.
10 to 20% would be really high inflation but we’re talking about like 200 or 300% wood prices. Nah, even if we happen to have higher inflation than any other year in the last century, lumber prices will still fall a lot.
What people consider ‘bad’ inflation is too much money/demand chasing constrained supply that can’t keep up.
If it is a required/needed good, that causes people to raise the amount they are willing to spend to get what they need. Inflationary spirals happen when this ‘infects’ enough markets. Everyone is spending all their money chasing an ever harder to get/more expensive set of essentials, and are willing to spend more and more as time goes on as they get more desperate.
Lumber is probably negotiable/non-essential enough it’s not likely to kick off an inflationary spiral. Food, rent, transportation, though tend to be key.
It doesn't appear to be fundamentally weaker for many applications. If it's yields are 3-4x times what "SPF" is, then maybe use slightly larger boards in support roles?
I'm not associated with worldtree.eco, and obviously they are advertising a product, but I can't really find any more discussion on the pro/cons of empress tree wood production.
The invasiveness problem I heard was specific to a particular species of empress, there are empress species that don't spread so aggressively.
You're missing the point: most houses are built without an engineer ($$$) and are only allowed because they follow narrow guidelines about what is allowed. Lumber must be graded SPF. You couldn't substitute oak (stronger) if you wanted to without custom engineering. So for nearly every builder it would cost more to use that lumber than SPF until someone gets it codified into the building code. And, like generic drugs, there's little financial incentive to make that fight with the regulators. So we sit in a local minima forever.
"there's little financial incentive to make that fight with the regulators"
Global warming will be the incentive in this case. If Empress tree lumber is that much better for carbon sequestration, and from what I've read it is a fantastic sink and converting sequestered carbon in trees into lumber in construction is a decent long-term strategy in this case.
Really my only interest in pushing empress tree lumber here is the carbon sequestration. I'm not some empress tree farmer or some other scam. The other advantage is that empress trees are pretty hardy from a soil/arable land standpoint, leading to more opportunities to sequester carbon in areas that don't easily forest over like, maybe, Texas badlands.
The other angle is that rapidly replenishing lumber sources prevent old growth forest from being destroyed, which ties into biodiversity and habitat destruction.
Is it? There's only about 3 million people in SV; Houston or Chicago are larger. While SV may have a disproportionate representation on HN, that area is likely still a small percentage of the users here. (as a single data point, I'm in Houston)
Both of those statements are false. HN is neither by, nor for, an SV audience, and you can easily tell that by the many critical perspectives that appear here on every topic associated with SV.
Would you remind reviewing the site guidelines? They ask you not to post the kind of flamebait and name-calling that you added to this thread.
This type of defense is totally disingenuous. You refered to this website as "SV's boys club", and now are arguing you are just being "pithy".
I neither live in SV nor am a boy and that doesn't have any impact on the value I get from this site. The fact that the majority of users are from the US and hence some articles have a US focus is also unsurprising.
If a large enough percentage of users of a site are from a given country then isn’t it natural that those users will unconsciously make a corresponding assumption in their posts. This is especially so since for most Americans talk about neighboring countries is low.
It seems to me that a website in English that has 50% users coming from the U.S. qualifies for the 'if' part of my statement. I think it's understandable for there to be a U.S. centric viewpoint on this site. Not that this is a good thing but it is understandable. It would be good in general for Americans to have a less U.S. centric view. (I grew up in an American colony overseas.)
Sure, I don't think that part of your statement was a problem. You're kind of dipping a toe into nationalistic flamebait though, which is probably why the GP got downvoted.
Guys, maybe you can help me. Should I buy a house in California in this market? Or will it all crash when the foreclosure ban ends at the end of July???
This chart of lumber futures gives an idea of the recent past (zoom out 1-5 years for perspective):
<https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=CME%3ALBS1!>
In a nutshell: a huge advance and now what appears to be a crash (~ -50%) is currently in progress.
The bigger picture is how indicative this compressed boom-bust story is of the future of the surge in US inflation. Lumber is showing us how easy it is for the market to reject ridiculous prices. What's unclear is how low lumber, and other goods/commoditiies that have seen similar booms, can go.
Edit: this links seems to work better
https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/CME-LBS1%21/