We created the BTS Sales Index to give a simple and easy-to-understand predictive monthly metric that gives enterprise leaders the right vantage point by which to view their critical business decisions.
BTS Sales Index February 2019 Update: +2.6
BTS Sales Index February 2019: 111.4 (+2.4%)
January 2019* in the Economy
- Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 in January increased $81 billion, from $3.385 trillion in December to $3.465 in January
- The US economy added 304,000 nonfarm jobs, ahead of the 165,000 prediction
- The Federal Reserve indicated that it was done raising interest rates for now, suspending its previous plans to continue increasing rates in 2019
- According to the Congressional Budget Office, the five-week federal government shutdown took a significant economic toll and cost the US economy $11 billion, nearly a quarter of which is permanently lost
- The unemployment rate increased from 3.9 percent in December to 4 percent in January, likely an effect of the government shutdown
- Stocks had their best January gains in more than 30 years due to relatively strong corporate earnings, continued optimism about the US economy, and the shift in the Fed’s interest rate plans for the rest of the year
*the February update is reflective of January 2019 data
Why
Line of business and sales leaders tasked with making strategic decisions don’t have a good measure of confidence when deciding to ramp up production or invest in customer relationships. Quarterly GDP numbers and the S&P 500 paint two different pictures of economic performance, the former too slow to incorporate new data and the latter too likely to overreact to investor sentiment.
We created the BTS Sales Index to give a simple and easy-to-understand predictive monthly metric that gives enterprise leaders the right vantage point by which to view their critical business decisions.
What
The BTS Sales Index represents the aggregate total revenue of the 1,000 largest publically traded companies in the US in one simple to understand number.
How
As mentioned above, the BTS Sales Index is comprised of the total revenue of the largest 1,000 publically traded companies incorporated in the US. Every month, we collect the total revenue reported by these companies and run the data through our custom-built indexing tool. The index uses the total revenue of the BTS 1,000 companies at the end of the second quarter of 2013 as its baseline because the economy showed signs of stable recovery. Unemployment was back to normal rates, housing prices remained steady, and stock prices were back to record levels.