Lumber prices are breaking records. First position Spruce-Pine-Fir futures are trading at over $1500/metric ton. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the spike in lumber prices is that builders have been able to pass them on to customers. The Fed should be very worried about the rapid rise in prices going directly to consumers. The central bank’s policy of low interest rates for longer could buckle under the pressure if inflation heats up faster than expected.

Ryan Dezember reports in The Wall Street Journal:

The Fed last week recommitted to near-zero interest rates, which have fueled the red-hot housing market. Rising home prices and low rates have also helped existing homeowners refinance mortgages to pocket cash without adding much to payments. Mortgage-finance firm Freddie Mac estimates that Americans last year withdrew nearly $153 billion from their homes in cash-out refinancings. Vacation options were limited by the pandemic and a remodeling boom ensued.

Demand hasn’t been diminished by soaring prices, mill executives say.

“The prices appear to be passing on,” Canfor CEO Don Kayne told investors Friday. Canfor, which owns mills in northwest Canada and throughout the U.S. South, notched quarterly records in sales and profit. “So far we haven’t seen the resistance that you would expect.

Builders including PulteGroup Inc. and the Howard Hughes Corp. say they have offset higher prices for lumber as well as for other building materials by raising home prices without slowing sales. NexPoint Residential Trust Inc. investment chief Matthew McGraner assured shareholders that high lumber prices weren’t eating into the apartment owner’s margins. “Any additional costs, we’ve been able to pass on to the tenants,” he said.

At a recent investor conference, Lowe’s Cos. finance chief David Denton said the home-improvement chain and its rivals weren’t waiting to see if the run-up in lumber prices would be short-lived before raising prices.

“That largely gets passed on pretty much real-time into the marketplace and you’re seeing that across the industry,” he said.

There is likely a storm coming in commodity prices. Young’s World Money Forecast is your port in a storm. Click here to sign up today for regular updates.

First-quarter GDP estimates came in at a robust 6.4%, with growth likely to accelerate to more than 8% next quarter. Over the coming weeks, economic activity in the U.S. will surpass its pre-pandemic high. With the Fed pumping over a trillion dollars of liquidity into financial markets annually and the Six Trillion Dollar Man (Joe Biden) proposing new schemes to run up the deficit, GDP is poised to increase at its fastest rate in decades this year. Josh Mitchell reports:

A burst of growth put the U.S. economy just a shave below its pre-pandemic size in the first quarter, extending what is shaping up to be a rapid, consumer-driven recovery this year.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services made in the U.S., grew at a 6.4% seasonally adjusted annual rate in January through March, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That left the world’s largest economy within 1% of its peak, reached in late 2019, just before the coronavirus pandemic reached the U.S.

The pandemic created a perfect storm for Amazon. With more people shopping, and more people working from home using cloud services, Amazon’s profits have soared. Sebastian Herrera reports for The Wall Street Journal (abridged):

Amazon. AMZN 0.37% com Inc. reported record quarterly profit as demand remained robust for its deliveries, cloud-computing and advertising businesses, capping a blockbuster earnings season for the world’s largest technology companies.

The Seattle company’s profits in the year since the pandemic started exceeded $26 billion, more than the previous three years combined. Net income from January to March more than tripled to $8.1 billion, and revenue of $108 billion far exceeded the average of analyst predictions on FactSet.

The tech giant’s success in the past year has catapulted the company to new heights, after consumers flocked to online shopping during pandemic lockdowns. Amazon’s dominant grip over e-commerce and continued expansion into new industries have strengthened its power, although the company continues to face challenges from regulators and some employees.

Amazon’s first quarter is typically slower than its preceding end-of-year results, which are aided by holiday shopping sales. Yet the company has exceeded expectations in recent quarters. It shattered sales records last year as homebound Americans turned to its delivery services. The company’s stock price rose 76% in 2020.

Amazon’s achievements have come as regulators increasingly scrutinize the company’s market power. Congress has considered changes to antitrust laws that could make it easier for the government to challenge certain business strategies and practices or force tech giants to separate certain units. Last year, a congressional panel found Amazon had amassed “monopoly power” over sellers on its site, bullied retail partners and improperly used seller data to compete with rivals.

In a response to its critics, Amazon is raising pay for many of its employees. Herrera reports elsewhere in the Journal:

Amazon. AMZN 0.37% com Inc. is raising wages for its hourly employees after a majority of workers at one of the e-commerce giant’s warehouses voted not to unionize.

The company said Wednesday that more than 500,000 of its employees would see pay increases of between 50 cents and $3 an hour. Amazon, which offers a starting wage of $15 an hour and employs roughly 950,000 people in the U.S., said the raises represented an investment of more than $1 billion.

According to a report by Edge by Ascential, which claims to deliver “one of the industry’s most accurate and actionable sales-driving data, insights and advisory solution sets,” by 2025, Amazon.com will outpace Walmart in retail sales. Bloomberg‘s Spencer Soper reports:

Amazon.com Inc. will supplant Walmart Inc. as the biggest U.S. retailer by 2025, according to a new report, suggesting the e-commerce giant has too much momentum for Walmart to stop despite big investments in its own e-commerce offerings.

By 2025, U.S. shoppers will buy US$632 billion worth of products at Amazon and retail afflilites including Whole Foods Market, surpassing Walmart’s US$523 billion, according to the report by Edge by Ascential, which measured the value of all goods sold by each company online and in stores with the exception of gasoline. Edge by Ascential helps brands sell products online and in stores.

To assess the relative size of Amazon and Walmart, Edge used gross merchandise volume, which measures how much money shoppers spend at each company. Traditionally company size is measured by comparing revenue, but doing so in this case doesn’t capture the full picture because the two companies have different models.

Amazon generates most of its sales from the approximately two million third-party merchants on its site, charging these sellers a commission that is typically 15 per cent of a given product’s price. What the merchants collect doesn’t show up on Amazon’s income statement.

While Walmart has a growing online operation and third-party marketplace, it remains mostly a traditional retailer, buying products from wholesalers and marking them up. Most products Walmart sells show up as revenue, so by that measure Walmart will outstrip Amazon for several years.

The report doesn’t include revenue from Amazon’s cloud computing division or advertising sales. It includes sales from both retailer’s affiliates, including Whole Foods for Amazon and Sam’s Club for Walmart, but doesn’t include fees for subscriptions like Amazon Prime or Sam’s Club.

“The pandemic has permanently shifted consumer habits from in-store to e-commerce,” said Deren Baker, CEO of Edge by Ascential. The main beneficiary is Amazon because Walmart is still playing catch-up even though it’s been spending to add features to its online store, including launching a Prime-style subscription service last year. Amazon, meanwhile, continues to build fulfillment centers around the country in an attempt to speed up delivery and erase the advantage Walmart enjoys with curbside pickup at its more than 5,000 locations.

I started in the institutional research and trading investment business at Model Roland & Co. on Federal St. in Boston in August 1971. Just up the street from Model were Fidelity Investments, and Wellington Management, both of whom I called on from my very first hours on the job.

Over five decades ago, Ned Johnson, aka “Mister Johnson,” ran the show at Fidelity. At Wellington, Jack Bogle, “Mr. Mutual Fund,” had not yet left Wellington to start Vanguard.   

My focus in the initial going was international research and trading, and remains so today all these decades later.  I still consider Fidelity and Wellington the industry leaders.

Both firms feature great cultures, industry-leading technology, well-rounded investment programs for individuals, families, and small businesses–the type of folk I hoped to be associated with throughout my investment career.     

Not a business day goes by that one of my associated companies is not involved with one or more of Fidelity or Wellington’s services.

I never would have expected, as I started out in August 1971, that I would be working with Fidelity and Wellington for over 50 years.

In Wellington’s case it, to this day, manages hundreds of billions of dollars in blue-chip, “prudent man rule” quality investment mutual funds. 

In the early ’90s, Wellington’s chief investor relations officer informed me that I directed more mutual fund assets Wellington’s way in a given year than did the rest of the combined American investment newsletter industry.

And now in 2021, with our little family investment management company requiring a cutting-edge custodian for our $1.3 billion-dollar conservative Boston-style management company we, not surprisingly, rely on Fidelity. 

Your Survival Guy, hard to believe, joined my family business over two decades ago. But before that, he was at Fidelity which he too recalls as being run like a family business. He writes:

When I joined the family business [Fidelity], I was Fidelity employee number twenty-something-thousand. I helped customers/participants of Fortune 500 companies manage their money in this fairly new savings vehicle known by its IRS code: 401(k). It turned out to be a thing. I’ll always remember how CEO Ned Johnson III ran the firm like the family business that it was.

In memos to employees, Mr. Johnson wrote to you as if you were seated around him at the dinner table. Business first, then, after some red wine and dessert (and maybe a piece of dark chocolate for digestion; because he was into taking care of one’s health) he’d leave you with something to think about—like his favored Japanese philosophy Kaizen, meaning constant improvement. Reading his memo in my little cubicle, not at his dinner table, I truly believed that through small steps—like compound interest—I could become the best version of myself. Then it was back to stuffing checks into envelopes.

We need to be reminded of this in times like these. Because when a video game company you typically see at the Mall can stop the market in its tracks, you need to figure out if you’re doing everything you can to protect your money. Are you with an investment company that treats you like a family member? Take a look at the brokerage firms selling their clients’ (I hope not yours) trading patterns to their other customers—these are household names that may (or may not) surprise you. Pay attention.

Action Line: Get your money with a firm that treats you like family. Too many investment firms are profiting from you, for example, with your information without you even knowing it. And don’t get me started on how they use your cash to lend out to others and pocket the profit.

P.S. Read more about how I got my start at Model Roland & Co. back in 1971, and gold’s 50-year price explosion.