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BTS Sales Index – August 2018 Update

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Published on: August 2018

Written by: Molly MacLean

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 2018 Update: +2.5

BTS Sales Index August 2018: 107.9 (+2.4%)

July 2018* in the Economy

  • Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 in July increased from $3.279 trillion in June to $3.356 trillion, equivalent to $78 billion in growth
  • Businesses added over 200,000 new jobs in the month of July, continuing the trend of strong job growth
  • Healthcare added the majority of new jobs, followed by professional services, leisure and hospitality; small business job growth was higher than expected
  • Construction spend and manufacturing activity slowed due to tariffs and increasing capacity constraints caused by a healthy economy
  • The Fed unanimously voted to keep interest rates unchanged this month, although they are expected to raise rates next month and once more later this year
  • Consumer confidence is up, but may change amid tariff concerns

*the August update is reflective of July 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.