Jan 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Rick Weber

He said the following are available at www.federalreserve.gov/releases:

• Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization.

  “Monthly data is absolutely necessary for generating a graph of something that shows your business cycle of activity in that industry or sales of that product line. You need monthly data to know what's going on in terms of the business cycle, which enables you to do cyclical analysis. It's important to know whether things are moving up approaching a peak or moving down away from peak or whether you're on the flip side of that line and moving toward or away from a trough. You need to know where you are in a business cycle in your segment of the larger economy in order to do market planning. And in order to do that, you need monthly data.

  “And you can get that for a couple of segments near and dear to our hearts: monthly production indexes for medium duty and heavy duty. You can start comparing your sales to it and you get a picture of what the entire industry is doing in terms of the cycle.”

• Selected Interest Rates. These are daily and monthly short- and long-term rates, which can be used as a leading indicator for forecasting.

  “Why care about that?” he asked. “Because they're a leading indicator of what's going to happen in this industry. Are interest rates going up or down?”

• Available at: www.transtats.bts.gov:

• Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Numerous monthly statistical programs include data on freight shipped by mode, allowing for calculation of percent change in freight shipped by all modes.

• Trade associations. For application market data, including state government, construction, utilities, rental/leasing, freight forwarding, and many others.

• Trade magazines.

• Market forecasting companies and consultants.

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