What if you bought Lumber in 1995?

Commodities · Wood. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.

The story

Lumber futures track North American softwood framing lumber, the raw material for most US houses, so they mainly reflect American housing starts. They also bear the scars of one of the world's longest trade disputes: the US and Canada have fought over softwood lumber duties since the 1980s, with tariffs repeatedly imposed and renegotiated. Prices were range-bound for years, then fell hard as US housing collapsed after 2006, and sawmills across British Columbia and the US South closed or curtailed production.

The recovery was gradual, helped by renewed homebuilding and additional US duties on Canadian lumber in 2017. Then the pandemic produced one of the wildest commodity moves of the era: mills had cut output in spring 2020, just as stuck-at-home Americans began renovating and buying houses, and lumber rose above $1,600 per thousand board feet by May 2021, several times its normal level. It fell back almost as quickly once supply caught up. Because this game samples prices at the start of each year, that spike barely shows; the long-run change was modest.

The lesson: Snapshots can miss the most dramatic events entirely; lumber's 2021 spike vanished within months, so short-lived bottlenecks are rarely capturable by long-term holders.

$1,000 invested at the start of each year

green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money

Best entry point in our set: 2008, turning $1,000 into $2,391. The S&P 500 from that same year: $4,626.

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