Lumber Slingers

Brad Jacobs just put down another billion, this time into CKX Lands. Is he going after the whole building materials supply chain? Chelsea and Trent are back from NAWLA Traders Market to break it down, plus QXO’s Q3 numbers, Interfor’s $53.2M impairment, Ace Hardware’s quarter, and ABC Supply’s Midwest leadership change (with official headshot ratings). Then the weekly numbers: diesel stuck at $6.2...

Two lumber podcasts, one booth, live from the 30th NAWLA Traders Market in Anaheim. Chelsea and Trent team up with Ashley Boeckholt and Gregg Riley of The Lumber Word and Sitka USA for a crossover episode right on the show floor. Ashley has been to every single Traders Market, from the very first one in a hotel basement at DFW to the show three weeks after 9/11 (NAWLA literally gave him a medal fo...

Part two of Bots and Boards is Natalie squared. Dr. Natalie Nelson-Marsh of the University of Portland has spent 25 years studying what happens to people when technology flips work upside down, and she’s here as the antidote to both the doomers and the hype crowd. She explains what generative AI is actually doing under the hood, why it’s such a people pleaser, and why handing it your homework is l...

It’s our Halloween special, and the costumes are doing a lot of the talking. Katy Perry is still paying her diesel bill, Elizabeth Holmes says she’s raising money for version two, and Gaston keeps losing track of Belle while he reads you the week’s lumber news. Under all that, there’s real news. A pallet acquisition grows one big player’s network, a major Southern Pine reinvestment gets an Arkansa...

Bots and Boards kicks off with the man who was warning everyone about AI back when nobody wanted to hear it. Charles Jennings, author of Artificial Intelligence: Rise of the Light Speed Learners and former CEO of NeuralEye, joins Natalie and Chelsea to explain what AI really is, why researchers call it a black box inside a black box, and what “math cookies” have to do with training it. He also lay...

Two lumber podcasts walk into a newswire. Ashley Boeckholt of The Lumber Word joins Natalie, Chelsea, and Trent to announce something big for the 30th NAWLA Traders Market in Anaheim. Ashley was at the very first Traders Market, and he has stories: wild cab rides, protesters, and the tech booths hidden in a corner. Trent then runs the week’s news. There’s an acquisition with a confusing name, Cana...

This episode is sponsored by Valon Kone. Natalie and Chelsea go international with Sebastien, Teemu and Shanna of Valon Kone, the Finnish family company that went from hand-peeling logs after World War II to running debarkers in sawmills around the world. We get into why bark is a bigger deal for your chips and your saws than most people think, how you fit a debarker into a shipping container, and...

Trent’s adding life coach to the résumé, starting with some hard-won advice about puppy yoga and black pants. Natalie and Chelsea report from a team build that had more “blessings” than yoga. The crew also takes on Elon’s flying roadster and the great FedEx vs. UPS feud, then gets into the business news: the new softwood lumber duty and tariff rates taking effect Monday, composite decking changing...

Roseburg native Rick Sohn grew up in the family sawmill his German-baker father built from scratch, one of the first computerized sawmills anywhere, and later ran Lone Rock Timber. He joins Natalie and Chelsea to talk about Forest Bridges, the group he co-founded that puts timber people and conservationists at the same table to find a better way to manage BLM lands. We get into why the old growth...

Lumber Slingers is back after an unplanned two weeks off, and Trent has a score to settle with FedEx. Before we get to the news, we cover a haircut gone very wrong, Natalie’s diesel habit, and a tour of Trent’s china cabinet. Then we get into it: a sawmill is shutting down and going out with class, RONA has a new CEO, and ABC Supply is changing its Chief Information Officer. Trent also starts a ne...

Allison DeFord of the North American Forest Foundation (NAFF) joins Natalie and Chelsea to talk about what the next generation actually believes about trees, and what it takes to change that one classroom at a time. Trent is out this week but sent his homework, so we still get into a Fed decision nobody saw coming three years ago, a Canadian curveball out of Brussels, two mill investments worth ce...

Lumber Slingers is back after a long summer break, and Natalie, Chelsea, and Trent waste no time getting the band back together, sound effects and all. Between Italian ER visits, Scottish forestry trips, and a fight over who gets to press the air horn button, the crew digs into the trade war chaos that took over the summer: tariffs moving in both directions, USMCA in limbo and the AR7 final rates...

This week's Newswire hits different. The crew opens with a heartfelt tribute to Robbins Lumber and the community rallying around them after a devastating fire — a reminder of what really matters in this industry. Then Trent steers the ship (loosely) through lumber pricing that's about as exciting as a flat board, mortgage rates that just hit a nine-month high right as summer heats up, and gas pric...

This week Natalie and Trent are back with your Friday fix — and honestly, the market is giving them very little to work with. Lumber prices? Barely moved. Mortgage rates? Blinked down a hair. Applications? A polite nudge upward. But don't let the flatline fool you — there's plenty to dig into: two different "Builder Supply Companies" got acquired in the same week (yes, really), Interfor's Q1 numbe...

The crew is back from back-to-back trips and running on fumes and good intel. Chelsea just got home from the NAWLA Regional in Vancouver, BC, where 210 industry insiders gathered to talk about the very real pressure Canadian producers are under - and spoiler: it wasn't a warm and fuzzy room. Natalie swung through Louisiana for her CFO 10-group and got a firsthand look at how different logging oper...

The Newswire crew is back and they've got a lot of ground to cover — lumber prices on the move, mortgage rates hitting their lowest point in three spring seasons, and Brad Jacobs casually dropping a $17 billion acquisition on a Sunday afternoon with a "have a nice Sunday" energy that the rest of us can only aspire to. QXO's TopBuild deal is reshaping the supply chain landscape, West Fraser is jugg...

Ken Timmins, commodity trader at American International Forest Products and host of the Component Connection podcast, stops by to explain what actually happens on a 55-person lumber trading floor -and how he got hired by eating donuts in a sweater vest on zero hours of sleep. Ken breaks down the three pillars of trading (market analyst, sales, hard work), why lumber is more emotional than a third-...

Lumber prices are holding at $5.23 but don't get too comfortable — 2x4 #2 is getting scarce and construction input costs are up nearly 5% year over year, with crude petroleum doing the most damage (Natalie's paying $148 to fill her diesel tank, which is its own kind of tragedy). The Montreal Wood Convention drew a big crowd with Canada-US tariffs as the unofficial theme, Mirax is firing up the for...

AR7 preliminary results are in — and we've got thoughts. Or at least, we have the numbers and a strong commitment to neutrality. From there, consolidation nation delivers: UFP Industries' Decorators brand scoops up MoistureShield assets, Bed Bath & Beyond apparently didn't get the memo that they went bankrupt and is now acquiring Lumber Liquidators' parent company and the Container Store, and Tren...

Year two at the Mass Timber Conference for their 10 year anniversary and we're practically locals. We're recording live from the Union Ironworkers booth — on the second floor of a structure they built inside the Oregon Convention Center — talking show stats, Shark Tank-style investor pitches, and why every lumber person should have this conference on their radar. Then we sit down with Neveah, an a...

It's Good Friday, lumber prices are up, and Claude personally removed Trent from the podcast for being a non-believer. (He's fine. Probably.) This week: WS Building Materials makes its debut, Mead Lumber keeps stacking locations, QXO finally closes on Kodiak, Rainier gets a new logo (the panel has thoughts), and mortgage rates are doing absolutely no one any favors. Also: Buc-ee's, Aperol Spritzes...

Natalie has laryngitis. Chelsea has opinions about the Brawny Man. Trent has mortgage rate news that nobody asked for but everybody needed. This week's episode is equal parts industry intel and chaos — the good kind. We're tracking rising lumber prices, freight rates that are giving Chelsea serious COVID-era flashbacks, and mortgage applications that just fell off a cliff. Oh, and that mystery exe...

33.33% of us are back from the NAWLA T-100 conference in Dana Point. This week's episode covers what made T-100 different from Traders Market, why smaller and more intimate sometimes means bigger picture, and what Chelsea brought back to her company from being in a room with some of the top leaders in the lumber industry. They also celebrate a historic moment, Donna Whitaker becoming the first fem...

This week Trent Johnson and Chelsea Zuccato cover: Windy city weather and atmospheric river in Oregon. Flatbed spot rates hit their highest point since October 2022, If you're buying or selling lumber on delivered pricing, this matters right now. The mood at the LMC show in Chicago was positive with no negativity on the floor. Mortgage applications ticked up but so did mortgage rates. March is goi...

The International Mass Timber Conference is three weeks out and this year it's doing something we've never seen before. We sat down with Shelby Cherry, Show Director for the International Mass Timber Conference, to get the inside track on what's coming — and let's just say the 10th anniversary is going to be a good time! We're talking live investor pitches, a keynote from one of the most influenti...