The consensus you can buy today tells you what analysts think now. It cannot tell you what they thought on a Tuesday in 2015, which is the only thing a backtest cares about. Rebuild history from a live feed and you inherit two silent errors: revisions that overwrite the past, and tickers that quietly dropped out when they delisted.
AnaChart’s analyst price target dataset is stored the other way around: point-in-time and survivorship-free. 661,383 price targets and 759,654 ratings, each kept as it stood on its issue date, across 7,191 analysts and 9,686 tickers, back to 2004 with deep coverage from 2013.
Why point-in-time matters
Every target carries its issue date and the price at issue, and the previous target is kept rather than overwritten. So when you ask what consensus looked like on any past date, you get the answer as it stood then, not as it was later revised. That is the difference between a backtest you can trust and one that has quietly read tomorrow’s newspaper.
Why survivorship-free matters more
The bigger leak is the one you cannot see. A universe that only contains today’s live tickers has already dropped the companies that failed, merged, or delisted, which is exactly the set a strategy needs to be tested against. AnaChart keeps delisted, renamed, and acquired names, so a backtest sees the losers as well as the survivors. For a name’s track record across firm moves, see the accuracy data.
How to join it to your history
Join on ticker and action_date against your own price or holdings history and every row lines up without look-ahead bias. The full query is on the use-cases page, and the data arrives as a native Snowflake or BigQuery share so there is no pipeline to keep in sync.
Test the shape on one name
The free Apple sample includes the point-in-time fields for every analyst on AAPL, enough to check the structure before you license the universe. Request the AAPL sample, or ask about the full history.
FAQ
What makes analyst data point-in-time?
Each target and rating is stored with its issue date and the price at issue, and prior values are kept rather than overwritten, so any past date can be reconstructed as it stood then.
Does it include delisted stocks?
Yes. Delisted, renamed, and acquired tickers are kept, which is what makes a backtest survivorship-free.
How far back does it go?
Records reach back to 2004, with deep, continuous coverage from 2013 through 2026.