BTS Sales Index December 2018 Update
BTS Sales Index December 2018:
November 2018* in the Economy
- In November, aggregate revenue of the BTS 1000 increased from $3.404 trillion in October to $3.409 trillion in November, or $5 billion
- U.S. manufacturers expanded at a faster pace than in previous months, increasing new orders, production, and wages
- The U.S. became the world’s largest oil producer this year. In the last month, oil prices plunged by about 25 percent
- The U.S. and China agreed to a 90-day break from the trade war, with talks of immediately exporting U.S. agricultural products
- The Fed is meeting mid-December, so interest rates may increase again before 2019
*the December update is reflective of November 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.