BTS Sales Index June 2018 Update: -1.9
BTS Sales Index June 2018: 105.7 (-2.0%)
May 2018* in the Economy
- Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 in May was down by $63 billion, to $3.287 trillion from $3.349 trillion in April
- Wage growth has been modest compared with hiring growth
- Inventory growth, consumer spending, and exports have been growing slower than predicted, but are expected to accelerate
- Trade policies are expected to slow down business investments and create cost-cutting strategies
- Despite a lower Index, the economy shows signs of continued health, such as hiring increases driven by retail and healthcare industries, and continued steady growth in construction and manufacturing
*the June update is reflective of May 2018 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 publicly 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 publicly 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.