Question 1 The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a large shift in various commodity markets, particularly in commodities related to construction, such as lumber (wood). These large price movements have left many of your clients wondering what's next. Your first task, therefore, is to analyse the historical (and current) state of the lumber market and its forward curves. Such forward curves provide important information about market conditions for traders and investors. Lumber futures are traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and each contract is for delivery of 110,000 board-foot (a unit of volume of lumber, equivalent to about 2.36 litres).' Information about the historical market prices of 19 lumber futures contracts can be found in the attached Excel file: LumberData.xlsx. Each futures contract has a specific maturity date (for example, LSX22 = Nov 2022), and for each contract the file contains a series of market prices that correspond to the observed/historical market price at the beginning of a series of months (the date in column A). The futures prices quoted correspond to the price (in US Dollars) of 1,000 board-foot. (a) First, a client asks you to construct and plot the historical forward curves of lumber as would have be observed at three specific dates: January 1, 2020, before the COVID-19 market shock; ii. January 1, 2021, after the COVID-19 market shock; ji. i. January 1, 2022, now. You should use the close price for each historical observation and plot these three curves on the same axes with 'time-to-delivery' on the x-axis rather than the delivery date itself. For simplicity you should round the time-to-delivery to the nearest month; e.g. using data on January 1, 2022 of the November 2022 futures contract (LSX22) has 10 months left to delivery. Please also report the plotted future prices in a separate table.