主题：04/02/2009 Market View -- 宁子

Factory orders top expectations but the key revisions are killers.

A nice 1.8% gain in March topped the 1.5% expected and blew out Februarys -1.9% showing. Now that -1.9% made a stir when released because it was so much better than the -4.9% in December and the -6.5% in November. A 1.8% gain on top of that was huge.

Ah but the revisions. They are always the key because revisions tell the true story while the original number is more a combination of some data and a lot of 'expert' guesstimates. Upside revisions are excellent predictors of gaining strength. Downside revisions are, of course, just the opposite.

You surely have figured out why I went into such detail. January was revised down to -3.5%, an 84% haircut from the number originally reported. Thus the downside is still stronger than the experts think. Bummer. Still an improvement over December, but more of a statistical blip at the new level.

Non-defense capital goods orders rose 0.9%, up from -1.9% in January. Quite a turn from the -6.3% in December. Business investment is key to any recovery that tries to gel, and the business investment numbers help take some of the sting off the overall number and its sharp downside revisions for February.