The Index of Industrial Production (IIP) for Feb 2013 comes in marginally positive, at 0.57% over the previous year.
While the Mining Index sank and the Electricity part went negative for the first time since 2006, the manufacturing sub-index (which has the largest weight at 75%) stayed up at 2% above the previous year.
Past data for November 2012 has been revised downwards AGAIN. The chain of events:
- Nov 2012 IIP first announced at –0.12%
- First Revision down to –0.84%
- Now further revised down to –1.01%
This does not inspire confidence in the first announced numbers.
If you want to see “use based indexes”, here they are. Capital goods went up 20% 9.5%, but everything else went down. (Click for larger picture)
While the 0.57% headline number “beats expectations”, I believe the “expecters” are largely picking numbers from the air, and even this index is so wildly volatile, has so many revisions and is basically uncorrelated with any other sensible data point out there, that it makes no sense to trade expectations or otherwise.
