BTS Sales Index April 2018 Update
BTS Sales Index April 2018:
March 2018* in the Economy
- Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 in March is up to $3.387 trillion from $3.374 trillion in February, or up by $13 billion
- Construction spending continues to grow, though marginally
- Factory activity slowed due to skilled worker shortages and capacity constraints
- Business spending increasing due to corporate tax cuts
- Auto sales up and higher than expected due to high consumer demand
- Keep an eye out for the impacts of steel and aluminum tariffs, specifically on steel commodity prices and retaliatory trade threats
*the April update is reflective of March 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.