MAYFAIR MARKET UPDATE

Good day,

Here is what is happening in commodities this week:

Lumber…….Continues to have legs as late shipments and sparse mill offerings have buyers dazed and confused as to what their next move should be. Mill Files are late March/early April in many cases, add in 2-4 weeks for delivery.

So March is in the bag and perhaps April as well. As mentioned last week many yards in the prairies have purchased for March but will need to come back to the market soon to cover April/May.

We have news this week of mill curtailments due to high inventories on ground . Normally as buyers we here curtailment and we think markets will rise but given the fact mills cannot ship does it really matter if they curtail production?

A few questions we need to ask ourselves, Will we see more production curtailments? That is very likely. Will prices run much further? Sure feels like we are headed higher. Will builders / consumers support 2000/m 2×4? Time will tell.

Print was 15/m on 2×4 at Mid-Week and you can expect print to be up at least another 15/m or 30/m on the week at least.

Fact is many builders had a strong start to the year and have long order files, build times are a year in many cases. So can they  hit the stop button on building?

As we move into the 3^rd quarter higher interest rates and inflation will have had some impact but until then we will see higher prices for weeks and months to come.

Plywood…..Not much change again this week with mills OTM and late shipments the order of the day. Order files are into April, but ship times on plywood are still unpredictable so you can easily add 6-8 weeks to the April order file.

Plywood pricing will continue to climb until mills can get a better handle on shipments.

OSB…….Similar story to Plywood, still not enough supply to meet demand and pricing on this product line continues to go up in 50/m -100/m increments. If Plywood was not in the pickle it is in OSB would not be at the levels it is at today?

7/16 OSB is pushing 2000/m in some markets and that is about where buyers threw in the towel on the last market run. Where do we go from here? At this point who knows, but you can bank on it being a bumpy ride for some time to come.

Have a great night and happy selling.