Focus Report: market expectations (Central Bank of Brazil)
The median of the market expectations that the Central Bank of Brazil collects every week from banks, asset
managers and other institutions, for IPCA inflation, the Selic rate, the exchange rate and GDP, by reference
year, since 2001. It is the figure the news quotes on Monday. Page at /focus, data as JSON and
CSV at /focus/series.
Why it lives in the Macro section
Like the macro series, it is an aggregate compiled by the Central Bank
that nobody rebuilds from a public filing: you either accept the official figure or you do not use it. So it has its
own table (focus_expectativa) and its own section, with the source and the licence written on every page and every
response.
The source, and what is read from it
The Central Bank "Expectativas" Olinda API (olinda.bcb.gov.br, version v1), dataset
ExpectativasMercadoAnuais: one row per indicator, survey day and reference year. We read only the median (the
middle of the answers, which the Focus itself highlights) and the number of respondents.
| Indicator | Name at the source | What an expectation for year Y means |
|---|---|---|
| IPCA | IPCA |
change from December to December of Y |
| Selic | Selic |
Selic target at the end of Y |
| Exchange rate | Câmbio |
exchange rate at the end of Y, R$ per US$ |
| GDP | PIB Total |
GDP growth in Y, in volume |
Only calculation base 0 is read (valid answers of the last 30 days, the base of the Focus Report). The shorter base 1 is not read. The source data start in August 2000; the first reference year with an expectation made at the end of the previous year is 2001.
Licence
Checked before publishing. The page of the "Expectativas de Mercado" dataset on the Central Bank open data portal declares the ODbL 1.0 licence (Open Data Commons Open Database License): free use, including commercial, citing the Central Bank as the source and sharing the derived database on the same terms. It is the same licence as the SGS series we already use. Source: https://dadosabertos.bcb.gov.br/dataset/expectativas-mercado.
One snapshot per week
The survey is daily and the report is weekly. We keep the last survey of each week (per indicator and reference year), in practice Friday's, which appears in Monday's report. The nightly collection replaces the snapshot of the current week when a newer day arrives; a week never holds two snapshots.
"How accurate the market was"
For each closed year Y: the expectation for Y from the last survey of December of Y-1 (about 12 months before the end of Y) against the realised figure, taken from the macro series the site already keeps:
- IPCA: the 12-month change of December of Y (
ipca_12m, IBGE), which is the IPCA of the year. - Selic: the target in force on the last day with data up to 31 December of Y (
selic_meta, BCB).
The error is our subtraction (realised minus expectation), and the page says so. A year with no survey in December of Y-1, or with no realised figure in the database, is left out of the table: nothing is estimated. The summary (mean absolute error and how many years the realised figure fell within 0.5 point of the expectation) is also our arithmetic on the table shown. The exchange rate and GDP appear in the median and the evolution, but not in this comparison.
How the collection works
- Every week, in the database rebuild, each indicator is downloaded in full, in 3-year windows, with a 1-second
pause between requests and the robot identified (
DadosB3-bot). - Every night, only the last three weeks.
- Isolated failure. Each indicator is downloaded, checked and stored on its own; if the Central Bank is down, the
indicator stays as it was, and a rebuild from scratch inherits from the previous database. The result appears in
/saude. - Plausible range. A median outside a wide range (IPCA between -5% and 60%, Selic between 0 and 60%, exchange rate between R$ 0.50 and R$ 20, GDP between -20% and 20%) is a misreading, and the indicator's batch is refused without storing anything.
What the page does NOT do
- It makes no forecast of its own and gives no investment recommendation. An expectation is market opinion, not a Central Bank projection and not a guarantee of anything.
- It does not recompute the median: it is the published one. The only calculations are the difference from the previous week, the error and the accuracy summary, and the page says they are ours.
Access
- /focus: the page (PT and EN), open.
/focus/series: JSON with the latest survey, the accuracy table, the source and the licence./focus/series/{indicator}(ipca,selic,cambio,pib): the whole weekly series, open, as JSON or CSV (?formato=csv), filtered byde,ateandreferencia.