The Institutional Brokers' Estimate System (I/B/E/S) is a service founded by the New York brokerage firm Lynch, Jones & Ryan and Technimetrics, Inc. I/B/E/S began collecting earnings estimates for U.S. companies around 1976 and used the raw data to calculate statistical time series for each company.
Successor company Thomson Reuters spun off its financial division under the name Refinitiv in 2018, which itself became a subsidiary of LSEG in Jan 2021.
The I/B/E/S current forecast database is offered on a summary (consensus) level or detailed (analyst-by-analyst) basis.
With over 33 data items that are updated as often as five times a day, it is designed to help portfolio managers and analysts identify, manipulate, and analyze exceptional information for over 40,000 equities worldwide.
There are two versions of the I/B/E/S earnings estimate history, Summary and Detail: Both data sets are available for US and International stocks.