Purchasing managers are in a great position to judge the state of the economy (at least as far as their company goes). They know how much they sold last month, how much they expect to sell this month, year-ago sales, etc. What if you could aggregate all this information and develop an index that tells you where the economy is going? Well, that is exactly what the ISM Manufacturing index does and it has been around for over 100 years (since 1915 to be exact). So what is the ISM index currently telling us?