BTS Sales Index July 2018 Update: -0.3
BTS Sales Index July 2018: 105.4 (-0.3%)
June 2018* in the Economy
- Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 in June was down to $3.279 trillion from $3.287 trillion in May, or by $8 billion
- Wages grew at a moderate pace, but interest rates are expected to continue to increase
- Manufacturing, Construction, Business Services, and Leisure and Hospitality jobs all increased in June, with retail payroll shrinking
- Exports increased, narrowing the trade deficit
- Watch for retaliatory tariffs from China, and potentially other trade partners, and their impact on the manufacturing sector in particular
*the July update is reflective of June 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.