BTS Sales Index October 2018 Update: -0.7
BTS Sales Index October 2018: 108.5 (-0.7%)
October 2018* in the Economy
- Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 decreased from $3.395 to $3.373 trillion in September, $22 billion in losses
- The Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the third time this year, from 2 to 2.25 percent
- Growth in the factory sector stalled after 15 months of expansion, with export orders falling more quickly than in over two years
- Despite the decrease in the BTS Sales Index, private-sector employment continued to grow with ADP reporting 230,000 new jobs in September
- Services sectors experienced high growth in September and the new US/Canada trade deal is expected to improve economic outlook
- Keep an eye out for the increasing trade tension between China and the US, specifically how it will impact imports
*the October update is reflective of September 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.