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If you only looked at the Housing Starts headline today, you probably missed something important.

A few sample headlines read:

• U.S. Housing Starts Jump 9% (WSJ)
• U.S. February Housing Starts Rise More Than Forecast (Bloomberg)
• Home Construction Rebounds in February (Forbes)

And this much is true.  Housing Starts -- -- defined as the number of units for which construction began -- surprised to the high-side in February.

And, not only did the figure beats consensus estimates, it also represented a 9% increase over January's numbers.

Normally, that would be a signal of strength.

But, let's look deeper.

Housing Starts data is collated and released by the Census Bureau.  In PDF format, the report is six pages long and contains all sorts of interesting data, broken up by region and time period.

Of all the data, here is the key excerpt upon which I want to focus:

Privately-owned housing starts in February were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,525,000. This is 9.0 percent (±10.2%) above the revised January estimate of 1,399,000.

I added the boldface for emphasis.

In other words, the Margin of Error on the measurement was larger than the measurement itself, rendering the result worthless.

Based on Margin of Error, Housing Starts could have just as easily been a negative number and that would be statistically acceptable.

Just one more reason to read deeper than the headlines, folks.

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Dan Green is an active loan officer. Email or call 513-443-2020. Dan is on Twitter at @mortgagereports.