BTS Sales Index March 2018 Update: 4.9
BTS Sales Index March 2018: 108.5 (+4.8%)
February 2018* in the Economy
- Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 in February is up to $3.374 trillion from $3.220 trillion in January, an increase of $154 billion
- Worker pay is rising due to extremely low unemployment numbers and winter weather; wait to see if average hourly earnings get back to steady rates
- Business spending is growing and is expected to continue
- The service sector had a strong month of growth, along with Construction and Manufacturing
- Business spending increasing due to corporate tax cuts
- Educational Services, Transportation, and Warehousing industries led growth in February
- Potential steel and aluminum tariffs may impact the numbers in coming months, especially in construction, utility, and oil industries
*the March update is reflective of February 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 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.