Historic analyst forecast earnings/dividends? Where to find?

[daleholborow]

I am currently running an optimisation of an investment strategy, that relies on analyst forecasts for equities.

For example, using an etrade account, take fundamental data for a previous year regarding earnings, book value etc etc, and use that to predict future earnings / returns on equity, etc. However, in the event that a market-moving piece of information is released, the earnings and dividends per share figures are updated in etrade (as a single, point in time value, predicting the figures for the coming two years), but no history of previous prediction values appears to be available.

Does anyone have any experience retrieving such a stream, and could you point me to where you found the info? Currently I am compiling data from etrade, yahoo, and have looked at google finance but that doesnt seem to have a query-able stream either.

Thanks

 

[alain]

Does anyone have any experience retrieving such a stream, and could you point me to where you found the info? Currently I am compiling data from etrade, yahoo, and have looked at google finance but that doesnt seem to have a query-able stream either.

Thanks

I'm almost 90% sure Datastream has that information (http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/financial/financial_products/a-z/datastream/). We used it in our prop model 3 years ago. However it is not cheap. Ok, let me re-phrase it. From what I remember, it was extremely expensive.

If you are in school or associated with a school, you might be able to get access to Datastream.

 

[daleholborow]

Thanks alain, I am working on this of my own accord so unfortunately my funds are limited and my access to paid data is non-existent. That said, the only experience I had with Datastream was during my Masters degree, trying to load bond prices for some pricing models, and I found it extremely lacking in relational data... I don't know if it is any better these days.

On the plus side, my model seems to be very promising, and the forecast figures that I DO have access to don't seem to add much to the performance anyway, so go figure?