Sources for Historical Analyst Price Target Revisions

Summary

The document considers where to obtain historical analyst actions, especially individual price target changes that may be missing from free finance websites. It notes that Yahoo Finance displays some rating changes and aggregate target statistics, but the questioner finds its action history incomplete and lacks target revisions for each analyst action.

The accepted answer says that comprehensive analyst estimate histories are unlikely to be available from free sources. It identifies I/B/E/S Estimates as a detailed commercial database with broad company coverage and a long history, and mentions Zacks as another source of compiled bottom-up consensus estimates. The document does not compare access terms, exact target-change fields, or coverage depth for the alternatives; those details would need verification before choosing a source. Its practical lesson is that research using analyst revisions may require paid, specialized data rather than a free general finance feed.

Key ideas

• Free finance websites may omit individual analyst target revisions and action history.
• The accepted answer identifies I/B/E/S Estimates as a detailed commercial source for analyst estimates.
• Zacks is mentioned as an alternative, though the answer leaves its data depth unclear.
• Researchers should verify historical coverage and available fields before selecting a dataset.

Tags

# Analyst Action Data


# Analyst Action Data












I want to build models based on analyst action data that include historical price target changes from analysts. Yahoo finance only shows the rating change but no price target change for every action. For target price, hey only show the min, max and avg. The data from yahoo finance is also not comprehensive that many of the analysts' rating were missing.

Anyone knows better source (free will be the best) that include the info that is missing from yahoo finance?

Thank you

## Answer by Helin (score 1, accepted)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/39789

It is unlikely that you can achieve this with free sources alone. The standard database for analyst estimates is I/B/E/S Estimates, which has extremely detailed analyst estimates for "22,000 companies in 100 countries." They've also been doing this for a very long time – If I remember correctly, US estimates go back to the late 1970s. An alternative is Zacks, which also compiles bottoms-up consensus estimates (although the depth of the data is unclear).

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