Lumber is a critical industrial commodity. Like crude oil, natural gas, copper and other base metals, and ferrous metals, wood is a building block of infrastructure and essential construction material. Just because the lumber futures market is not as liquid as many other industrial raw materials, it is nonetheless a benchmark when it comes to analyzing the overall health and wellbeing of the global economy.
Over my almost four decades of involvement in the commodities markets, I have never traded or invested in one futures contract of lumber. The market is too illiquid, which leads