BTS Sales Index December 2019 Update
-0.7
BTS Sales Index December 2019:
109.7 (-0.6%)
November 2019* in the Economy
- Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 decreased from $3.433 trillion in October to $3.410 in November, declining by $22 billion
- Consumer confidence fell in November for the fourth month in a row
- Surpassing expectations, employers added 266,000 jobs last month, the fastest pace since January
- November’s job tally was inflated by thousands of GM workers returning to their jobs after a six-week strike
- Despite a slight dip in the Index this month, the unemployment rate fell from 3.6 to 3.5 percent, back to a 50-year low
- A new round of US tariffs on Chinese imports are due to take effect in mid-December
*the December update is reflective of November 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.