Other details:

• Employment 3 versus 7 last month

• Wages 20 versus 17 last month

• Prices paid 7.12 versus 7.08 last month

• Prices received 5.27 versus 4.19 last month

• New orders -8 versus -6 last month

• Backlog of orders -21 versus -10 last month

• Capacity utilization -7 versus -7 last month

• Capital expenditures -12 versus -7 last month

• Services expenditure -19 versus -10 last month

• Finished goods inventories 4 versus 4 last month

• Raw materials inventory -2 versus 6 last month

• Equipment and software spending -8 versus -4 last month

This is a middling reading but it’s rarely a market mover. Prices paid appear to have stabilized.

For background, the Richmond Fed’s Fifth District Survey of Manufacturing Activity is a monthly gauge of factory conditions across Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, the District of Columbia and most of West Virginia. It’s released at 10 am ET, usually on the fourth Tuesday of the month, alongside the bank’s companion survey of service sector activity.

The headline is a composite manufacturing index, a weighted average of three components: new orders, shipments and employment. Like the other regional Fed surveys, each measure is a diffusion index calculated as the percentage of firms reporting an increase minus the percentage reporting a decrease, so zero marks the line between expansion and contraction.

Beyond the composite, the survey tracks backlogs of orders, capacity utilization, vendor lead times, wages and local business conditions, each with a matching expectations index for six months ahead. Its price data are presented differently from most regional surveys. Rather than a diffusion index, firms report the annualized growth rate of prices paid and prices received, giving a direct read on how fast costs and selling prices are rising, along with expectations for the next 12 months.

The district’s manufacturing base leans toward furniture, textiles, chemicals, food processing and transportation equipment, which makes it a useful window on parts of the industrial economy that don’t show up as clearly in Texas or New York.

The Richmond survey is one of the smaller regional reports and rarely moves markets on its own. Its value is in rounding out the regional picture alongside the Empire State, Philadelphia, Kansas City and Dallas surveys ahead of the national ISM manufacturing index.