BTS Sales Index - May 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 May 2020 Update

-4.3

BTS Sales Index May 2020:

108.8 (-3.8%)

April 2020* in the Economy

• Aggregate revenue of BTS 1000 decreased from $3.519 trillion in March to $3.384 in April, declining by $135 billion
• The US economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April, the largest decline by far since tracking began in 1939
• The unemployment rate jumped more than 10 percent in one month to 14.7 percent, also setting an unprecedented high since the Department of Labor started recording the data 72 years ago
• These job numbers do not include independent contractors, such as Lyft drivers, so the 14.7 percent unemployment rate most likely undercuts the number of jobless Americans
• With air travel down 95 percent year over year, oil and gas companies are cutting up to 30 percent of capital spending globally
• The now 23.1 million people unemployed are largely due to local governments placing restrictions on what businesses could be open, with about 60% of the economy remaining under stay-at-home orders

*the May update is reflective of April 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.