BTS Sales Index - April 2020 Update

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 April 2020 Update

-0.1

BTS Sales Index April 2020:

113.2 (-0.1%)

March 2020* in the Economy

• Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 decreased from $3.521 trillion in February to $3.518 in March, declining by $3 billion
• Nonfarm payroll employment fell by 701,000, the first decline in payroll growth since September 2010
• The unemployment rate rose to 4.4 percent; the last time the unemployment increased 0.9 month over month was January 1975
• March hiring was lowing than February across all industries, with three dropping more than 20 percent
• With the coronavirus pandemic still causing widespread shutdowns, be on the lookout for further impacts to the economy

*the April update is reflective of March 2020 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.