cost of shipping is the killer from the depos...all or none. So all the fur goes in and get moved. Remember that on the last mile of road in northern Ontario is North Bay

Commercial buyers probably would be resistant to pushing the sale back if they want to have garments reading for the winter selling season..

And dermestid beetles become an issue

^^^Of course.

Takes time to get fur thru the pipeline,dressing and felting slows thingas down.
Doesnt really matter when the auction is as long as the buyers keep stuffing the pipe.

I hear people whine all the time about long turnaround time from the dressers.
I dont have any turnaround time.I drop off my bags of fur for dressing and pick up my bag of dressed fur for the current selling season same day.

Ocob you have a year lag time is what you are saying, and you do not care. You have a year turn around and it would mater if you dealt in volume.

No only the first year was a year turn around.The only year I had to wait.
Now it is instant.The amount is irrelevant I could do the same with a small amount as well as my larger amounts.I know what I will move year to year,not rocket science to plan ahead.

What is wrong with people nowadays they cant plan chit.

Everyone uses the same pipeline.

If everyone is using the pipe line they must be planning chit. A hundred thousand dollars tied up a year might change your mind on it not mattering. Maybe five or ten times that?
When it gets to where the interest you can earn is more than your profit, things start to change. I have walked out of the fur room to get $100,000 cash to buy fur for the day. It adds up over a month or two, waiting on the pipe line.

There is no money tied up it is invested in your buisness.
No one retailing or manufacturing fur has instant turnaround.The do always try to have goods(and cash) moving in and out.

The simple answer would be to have a Dec. Sale.

I get a kick out of the spin about setting the market.

The season is over before they hold the first sale.

In todays fur world everything has been downloaded into the pocket of the trapper. .

I've always heard that "setting the market" or "when the market gets established".

Just what the heck does that mean in today's fur market?

If money is not in your bank or pocket, it's tied up. If you can't immediately turn around and sell your inventory/investments, you have no liquidity. If you're in the fur business, you need to have deep pockets
, good cash flow or an understanding bank/investor.

Most businesses closely monitor their cash cycle(# of days is takes to convert purchases/services redendered back into cash). This gets monitored even more closely when you borrow money to do it.

That's the advantage that the fur buyers like groenwald, Zander, etc have is they buy all season and can get stuff to the end users faster than those that just buy at the major auctions.

December and then when? The auction doesn’t want to handle “early” skins. There isn’t enough volume to have more/ multiple sales.

Back in the day sales were scheduled around other sales. Kopenhagen took their pick and the other houses worked around those dates. FHA typically rode off NAFA. North Bay was a lot closer to Toronto.

In order to set a market, you need a market. Ordinarily international competition would generate basis, that landscape has changed and route bandits are rising from the ashes. It’s a dire strait

I just averaged $100 for my northern fall beaver. They were put up and very nicely i might add. Still seem to be doing better than fur south of Alaska going to the hatter market.

PS Anybody know why fha is not moving sales back to feb and may like they used to be?

Theres the Thompson Fur Table that occurs before Christmas, think there's a December one in Prince Albert too but not sure on that one. Thompson gives a fella a peak at the prices but seem on the low side.

Craft market?

When the sale is that late, everyone buys the next year off of what the auction sold for the previous years results.

Trappers knowning what the real value of goods would or could be encouraged to trap more.

The reason the sales are so late is Fha thinks they will get most of all the trapper goods and don't care trying to gather as much fur without putting any effort into it.

Winning by default.

The sales so late pushes all the cost on to the trapper who has to wait months and months to get any cash flow.

A December sale properly promoted would have a lot of beaver and muskrats on it.

Sad fact that the volume keeps dropping and they don't do anything to increase it or encourage trappers to produce much.

How's the sale going?

I buy 3-500 brown shearing beaver every year at FHA. I have noticed a significant decline in the quality of shearing beaver I get back from the dresser in the past 10 or so years. Nope, I have not been to an auction in half a dozen years, I rely on a good friend I trust implicitly, who has been a fur broker for decades to buy for me. At one time through the 70's -90's I missed attending one single auction at NAFA, and attended one almost every year at SAGA in Finland.

MJM, You are correct, I agree that when there are hundreds of thousands of dollars tied up in inventory, the faster you turn it around the more profit you make, simple time value of money and interest costs. Some small timers on this site who have government retirements don't need to worry about getting a few bags of fur back once a year to play with a hobby that makes a few extra bucks, just because they don't have to make interest payments of thousands of dollars a month.