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Mid-way through a ninth year of increasing housing starts and growing lumber consumption, timberland investors and forest owners in the U.S. South continue to struggle with flat and, in certain local markets, falling sawlog prices. Previous posts discuss how this more…
In the show “Shark Tank”, a key lesson from watching entrepreneurs get grilled by Kevin O’Leary and company is the importance of knowing your numbers. The questions are always the same, so showing up unprepared is, frankly, inexcusable. What are more…
This is the third in a series related to Forisk’s Q2 2017 forest industry analysis and timber price forecasts for the United States. Forisk has been accumulating timberland transaction and ownership data for the past twelve years. The ownership data more…
In 1990, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman and two colleagues published a study documenting how we can “overvalue” things we already own (D. Kahneman, J. Knetsch and R. Thaler, “Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem,” The more…
Albert Einstein, the smartest guy most of us never met, said, “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.” [Fascinatingly, this quote, along with others, can be found on the IRS website here.] Taxes matter in more…
Visitor traffic on the Forisk Blog increased 12% in 2016 over 2015. Thank you! Here are the top five posts from 2016: Forest Finance: What Does a Negative or Zero NPV Say About My Potential Timberland Investment? This brief post more…
During a recent “Investing in Timberland and Timber REITs” workshop, a student asked about the “problem” of liquidity for timberland investors. We have posted on this theme before, and the issue clearly differs for those buying shares in publicly traded more…
In September 2012, Forisk published analysis of timber markets across the U.S. South that estimated how excess sawtimber inventories could dampen or delay the “strengthening” of pine sawtimber and chip-n-saw prices in local timber markets. Specifically, we wrote: “…the effect more…
Economists surveying the landscape following the 2016 US Presidential Election expect trade wars, economic growth and higher inflation. For me, this raises two questions. One, do the expectations of these analysts matter? That’s the performance question, and the track record more…
Once the election results were in, the emails started pinging at 3 a.m. with questions that can be summarized as, “How will a Trump presidency affect timber prices and the US forest products industry?” While the commentary in these messages more…