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BTS Sales Index

August 2019 Update

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Published on: August 2019

Written by: Molly MacLean & Lisa Wayland

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 August 2019 Update: +2.2
  • BTS Sales Index August 2019: 105.7 (+2.1%)

July 2019* in the Economy

  • Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 increased from $3.282 trillion in June to $3.351 in July, growing by $69 billion
  • The unemployment rate remained the same month over month at 3.7 percent, which has continued to stay under 4 percent since February
  • US economy added 164,000 jobs in July, bringing the total labor force to 163.4 million, a record high
  • The Federal Reserve moved to cut interest rates by a quarter point, the first reduction since 2008
  • This reduction in interest rates and a healthy overall job market provide meaningful counterweight to trade tensions and weak global growth

*the August update is reflective of July 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.