ForestryBrief Professional #8
March 6th, 2026 - A $100 billion asset class with no price benchmark, no fee transparency, and no way to tell the barons from the hustlers. Here's what you need to know before writing a cheque. The Big Short in the Forest: What Nobody Tells You Before You Invest in European Timber Hello, If you haven't seen The Big Short, stop reading and watch it first. I'll wait. The 2015 film tells the story of the 2008 financial crisis. A handful of outsiders realised that the US housing market was built on toxic mortgages — packaged into complex instruments that nobody understood, rated AAA by agencies that never checked, and sold to investors who trusted the brochure. Everyone was making money. Nobody was asking questions. The few who did were called crazy. Until the whole thing collapsed. I've been thinking about that film a lot lately. Because European forest investment — an asset class I strongly believe in — is starting to show some of the same symptoms. Not the toxicity. Not the fraud (well, some fraud). But the structural blindness. The missing data. The assumption that "green" means "safe." The fact that billions are flowing in and nobody has built the basic infrastructure to tell good
