BTS Sales Index - March 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 March 2020 Update

+1.6

BTS Sales Index March 2020:

113.3 (+1.4%)

February 2020* in the Economy

• Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 increased from $3.47 trillion in January to $3.52 in February, rising by $48 billion
• Employers add 273,000 jobs in February, compared to the 175,000 projection
• Health care, food services, government, construction, professional and technical services all added jobs in February
• The unemployment rate dropped down to 3.5 percent, 0.1 percent lower than the start of the year
• While February was too early to see the impact of the coronavirus on the labor market, it was in a good place before the virus began to spread and cause concern
• Early indicators in the most vulnerable sectors include some travel and transportation companies imposing hiring freezes, postponing raises, and encouraging unpaid time off
• The next few months will undoubtably test the resiliency of this strong labor market

*the March update is reflective of February 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.