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 November 2019 Update: +1.2
BTS Sales Index November 2019: 110.4 (+1.1%)
October 2019* in the Economy
- Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 increased from $3.395 trillion in September to $3.433 in October, rising by $37 billion
- US employers added 128,000 jobs in October as the unemployment rate rose slightly to 3.6 percent
- The 0.1 percent increase in unemployment was due to 325,000 people entering the workforce; an encouraging sign for consumer spending
- Because of the GM strike in October, manufacturing employment decreased when 46,000 autoworkers were out of the workforce
- Employment in social assistance, food services, financial activities, professional and business services, and health care all increased
- At the end of October, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a quarter point for the third time this year
*the November update is reflective of October 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.