Nowcasting of Lumber Futures Price with Google Trends Index Using Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models

ABSTRACT

L/umber futures have been traded at Chicago Mercantile Exchange since 1969 (Mehrotra and Carter 2017). Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the lumber futures price has experienced huge volatility. The unusual fluctuations exposed lumber futures products that were originally designed to hedge uncertainties to huge risks. [...]there is an urgent need to find a reliable method to predict the lumber futures price, which would help enterprises and investors hedge risks and make correct decisions in the market. [...]Google Trends index is widely used to predict economic indicators and socioeconomic indicators, such as sales, unemployment, travel, consumer confidence (Choi and Varian 2012), consumer behavior (Carriere-Swallow and Labbe 2013), housing market (Dietzel 2016), the stock price (Hu et al. 2018), and so on. [...]the components of variables will change to capture dynamic trends of the real world.