Consensus Data
Consensus Estimates and Consensus Recommendations — plus the individual analyst estimates, ratings, target prices, and surprises behind them — for US and Canadian equities.
Consensus Data consists of Consensus Estimates and Consensus Recommendations.
Consensus estimates are the average of the forecasts of a public company's future stock price, future EPS, future Revenue, and other future income statement line items made by analysts employed at US equity research firms. Consensus estimates lie at the foundation of the equity investment ecosystem because (i) most stock valuation models are based on consensus estimates of future EPS, (ii) company stock prices are very sensitive to changes in consensus estimates, and (iii) stock prices react when EPS and Revenue are reported that differ from their consensus estimates (Surprises).
Consensus Recommendations are the average of the stock recommendations made by analysts employed at US equity research firms. Each research analyst makes their own stock recommendation using the schema of their employer. Zacks standardizes these schemas by converting each analyst recommendation to a 1 to 5 scale where 1 = strong buy, 2 = buy, 3 = hold, 4 = sell, 5 = strong sell. We then average these values to create the consensus recommendation for 4000 stocks.
Individual Recommendations underlie Consensus Recommendations. Because of our unique relationships with many research providers, in addition to calculating the consensus or average recommendation, we are able to provide the individual analyst recommendations, and identify both the analyst and their employer. Zacks clients are able to use and to display these individual analyst recommendations without prior entitlement from the research providers.
What Consensus Data Does Zacks Provide?
Consensus Estimates
Six consensus-estimate datasets, all updated daily:
- Quarterly and annual EPS for 5,000 US and Canadian companies
- Five-year expected EPS growth for 1,800 companies
- Quarterly and annual revenue for 4,500 companies
- Quarterly and annual EBITDA, EBIT, pre-tax income, and cash flow for 3,500 companies
- Line-of-business and geographic revenue for 1,800 companies, plus non-financial metrics — such as production levels and shipment volumes — for 1,000 companies
- Target prices for 5,100 companies
Every dataset includes the current consensus value, the number of contributing analysts, recent changes in the consensus, and the mean, median, high, low, and standard deviation of the underlying estimates.
Consensus Recommendations
The most timely and complete consensus of brokerage analyst stock recommendations available — covering more than 4,000 companies and updated daily.
Individual Analyst Recommendations and Target Prices
Zacks is the only provider of individual brokerage-analyst recommendations and target prices that do not require prior end-user entitlement from the brokerage firms.
Surprises — EPS, Revenue, and Non-Financial Metrics
Zacks unique consensus methodology, described below in the FAQ, creates surprises that are closely associated with stock price changes as proven by the performance of the Zacks stock rank. Since 1988, the portfolio of 200 Zacks #1 Rank stocks generated an average annual return of 24.5% (assuming no transaction costs) vs. the S&P return of 11.9% during the same period.
We provide surprise data at three frequencies - intra-day as companies report, end of day summary and weekly summary.
The surprise files include EPS surprises, Revenue Surprises, Company Guidance and Non Financial Metric Surprises.
History Files
For academic and financial research we maintain a history of consensus estimates of Annual EPS going back to 1979, of quarterly EPS from 1982, of broker recommendations from 1985, of Sales estimates and target prices from 2000. These historical files are available directly from Zacks and through the WRDS system provided by the Wharton School of Business at University of Pennsylvania and are included with the Zacks Research system for backtesting quant models.
Delivery Options
- API access (XML/JSON)
- Bulk CSV files
- Scheduled SFTP delivery
- Partner DaaS platform
Individual investors can access our consensus estimates through APIs offered by NasdaqData.com and Intrinio.
Frequently Asked Questions Methodology, the Zacks BNRI vs. Street definitions, history files, data quality, and more. →Talk to Zacks Data Sales
For more information, pricing, file formats, and API documentation, please contact Tom Carlson, VP, Data Sales, at tcarlson@zacks.com.