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 November 2018 Update: +1.0
BTS Sales Index November 2018: 109.5 (+0.9%)
October 2018* in the Economy
- Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 increased from $3.373 trillion in September to $3.404 trillion in October, or $31 billion
- The unemployment rate is now 3.7 percent, the lowest since 1969, and wage pressures have begun to build
- According to the Labor Department, wages and salaries rose by 3.1 percent, the highest level in a decade
- October was a brutal month for the stock market with the Nasdaq taking the brunt of the damage, tumbling 9 percent – its biggest drop in one month since November of 2008
- With the strong hiring and wage increases this month, keep an eye out as The Fed is expected to raise interest rates again before the end of the year
*the November update is reflective of October 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.