Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE: CAT) released its rolling three-month sales trends on Thursday, a monthly release that aims to smooth out the data in any given month. These numbers get used by analysts and investors to generate forward-looking data on Caterpillar sales trends, but they should keep in mind that in the first or last month of a quarter much of the data is already known.

It turns out that the rolling three-month period of retail sales statistics was less bad or flat in most regions for July, with the one exception being the Asia/Pacific region.

North America was down 5%, same as June’s rolling three-month report. Latin America was down by 37%, after having been down 50% for both June and May. The EAME (Europe, Africa, Middle East) sales trends were up 2%, after having been down 2% in June and down 7% in May.

The drag remains the Asia/Pacific region retail sales. This was down by 25% in July, worse than the 19% decline in June and worse than the 14% drop in May. Why this matters so much is that this was ahead of China’s devaluation moves that took place in August.

All world sales combined came to -11% in July’s three-month rolling period, better than the -14% in June and the -12% in May.

All components were lower as well, with oil and gas being the worst drop trend at -15% in July, versus -4% in both June and May. Transportation looked the worst on a nominal basis, at -23% in the period ending in July, but that had been even worse in June at -36%.

Caterpillar shares were down 0.7% at $76.87 Thursday morning. The consensus analyst target price is down to $82.00, and the 52-week trading range is $74.77 to $109.73.

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