WSJ:
Sales of new homes rose in February for the first time in seven months,
the Commerce Department reported Wednesday, another sign that the
housing market is thawing

Bloomberg:
Purchases of new homes in the U.S. unexpectedly rose in February from a
record low as plummeting prices and cheaper mortgage rates lured some
buyers. Sales increased 4.7 percent to an annual pace of 337,000 . . .

Marketwatch:
The U.S. housing sector continues to see signs of improvement. The
latest government data showed new home sales climbed in February for
the first time in seven months, sending shares of home-building
companies soaring.

A parade of the mathematically innumerate business writers (and even
worse headline writers!) continue to misread data. The latest evidence?
New Home Sales.

After incorrectly reporting the Existing Home Sales, the mainstream media misread the Census department report of New Homes.

No, New Home Sales data did not improve. In fact, they were not only not positive,
they were actually horrific. The year over year number was a terrible
down 41%.  Sales from this same period a year ago have nearly been
halved.

Why did the media report this as positive? If you only read the
headline number, you saw a positive datapoint: February was plus 4.7%
over January.

To get the the facts, you need to read below the headline. In the
present case, it wasn’t the seasonality factor that was confusing, it
was the “90-percent confidence intervals” — or as it is more commonly
known, the margin of error.

From the Census Bureau:

Sales of new one-family houses in February 2009 were at
a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 337,000, according to estimates
released jointly today by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of
Housing and Urban Development. This is 4.7 percent (±18.3%)* above the
revised January rate of 322,000, but is 41.1 percent (±7.9%) below the
February 2008 estimate of 572,000.

The median sales price of new houses sold in February 2009 was
$200,900; the average sales price was $251,000. The seasonally adjusted
estimate of new houses for sale at the end of February was 330,000.
This represents a supply of 12.2 months at the current sales rate.

Note that the month over month data at 4.7% — plus or minus 18.3%
— is statistically insignificant. (i.e., meaningless). The reported
data does not inform us if sales improved month-over-month or not. It
is a range, from down -13.6% to plus 23%. Since “zero” is part of that
range, we can draw no conclusion. As the Census Department itself
notes, “the change is not statistically significant; that is, it is uncertain whether there was an increase or decrease.”

The data does however, tell us that the year-over-year sales fell
41.1% plus or minus 7.9% gives us a range of -49% to -33.2%. The entire
range is negative, therefore we can conclude sales fell year-over-year.

These are facts. This is data. This is how you interpret it. Most of
the MSM reports (WSJ, Marketwatch, Bloomberg) were simply wrong.

Not nuanced, not shaded, but 2+2=5 wrong.

Let me remind that many of these folks incorrectly
misinformed you that Housing wasn’t getting worse in 2006, 2007 and
2008 — just as Home sales and prices went into an historic freefall.
Now, these same folks are misinforming you that Housing has turned
around and is improving. That is simply unsupported by the data.

(And don’t even ask about television — they simply read the wrong
news. Here is a life lesson for you: Never believe news people who read
teleprompters. They have no idea what they are doing, they are reading
what someone else wrote. When it comes to data interpretation, they are
quite literally clueless. Rely on news readers to your personal
financial detriment).

The bottom line: Learn to interpret data correctly. Avoid using the people who cannot do so as primary news sources.