QUOTE : nowhere has the stagger chart been more productive than in forecasting economic trends. The way it works is shown in the figure below, which gives us forecasted rates of incoming orders for an Intel division. The stagger chart then provides the same forecast prepared in the following month, in the month after that, and so on. Such a chart shows not only your outlook for business month by month but also how your outlook varied from one month to the next. This way of looking at incoming business, of course, makes whoever does the forecasting take his task very seriously, because he knows that his forecast for any given month will be routinely compared with future forecasts and eventually with the actual result. But even more important, the improvement or deterioration of the forecasted outlook from one month to the next provides the most valuable indicator of business trends that I have ever seen.