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 October 2019 Update: -0.4
BTS Sales Index October 2019: 109.2 (-0.4%)
September 2019* in the Economy
- Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 decreased from $3.409 trillion in August to $3.395 in September, declining by $14 billion
- The US economy added 136,000 jobs in September, far below the average for the last 12 months
- Manufacturing activity steeply declined for a second month in a row, hitting its lowest level since June 2009
- Despite the decline in hiring, the unemployment rate dropped from 3.7 percent to 3.5 percent, a new 50-year low
- The wage growth slowed from 3.2 percent to 2.9 percent in September, a puzzling combination with the unemployment rate
- The Federal Reserve is set to meet at the end of this month and will act depending on whether risks posed by the trade war and the global economic slowdown subside or strengthen
*the October update is reflective of September 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.