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BTS Sales Index – December 2017 Update

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Published on: January 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 December 2017 Update
0.4

BTS Sales Index Dec. 2017:

102.7 (-0.4%)

 

December 2017 in the Economy

  • Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 in December down $3.195 trillion from $3.207 trillion in November
  • Manufacturing sector continues to grow along with the Construction sector and Services sector
  • 4th quarter GDP growth expected to be around 2.5-3%, slightly lower than 3rd quarter growth
  • Business spending increasing in anticipation of corporate tax cuts
  • Watch for continued effects of President’s tax reform as well as impacts of cold weather moving forward
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.