Headline durable goods can swing 15% on a handful of widebody aircraft orders booked in one month. Non-defence capital goods excluding aircraft, usually called core capex orders, removes that lumpiness and is the standard proxy for business investment intentions.
Orders lead shipments, and shipments feed the equipment investment line of gdp. That makes the orders series one of the more reliable leading-indicator components for the business investment cycle.
Example: headline durable goods orders jump 9.8% on a large aircraft book, while core capital goods orders fall 0.4%. The tradable signal is the minus 0.4%, and forecasters cut their equipment investment estimates.
Related: industrial-production, gdp, leading-indicator, capacity-utilisation, business-cycle