Use cases & endpoints
BCB Focus survey API in English (market expectations)
Brazil publishes a weekly survey of market forecasters covering inflation, the policy rate, growth and the exchange rate over multiple horizons. For anyone modelling Brazilian assets it is the consensus benchmark, and for anyone outside Brazil it is a Portuguese-language endpoint that most international tooling never bothered to wrap.
The translation problem is small. The vintage problem is not: expectations are only useful next to the date they were formed, and a service that returns the current view discards the entire history that makes the survey worth querying.
Hindcast exposes Focus with English field names over the original terms, and keeps every weekly release rather than the latest one. Ask what the market expected for next year's inflation as of a past week and you get that week's answer with its publication date, alongside the realized series when the outcome eventually printed.
hindcast — session
previewhindcast> expectations for the policy rate as of a past week
→ tool: bcb_focus { indicator:"selic", horizon:"...", as_of:"..." }
✓ that week's median and dispersion with its release date
source: BCB Focus survey, weekly vintages retained
What's covered
- English field names with the Portuguese source terms as aliases
- Every weekly release retained as its own vintage
- Inflation, policy rate, growth and exchange rate expectations
- Multiple forecast horizons per indicator
- Median and dispersion where the survey publishes them
- Realized BCB series available for surprise calculations
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Questions
Why does the survey vintage matter for a backtest?
Because surprise is the difference between expectation and outcome, and expectation is a moving target. Using today's stored consensus for a past date measures nothing — the number has already absorbed information the forecasters did not have.
Is this a translation or a re-publication?
It is the same data with an English interface and vintage storage. The underlying values are BCB's; nothing is re-estimated, and the original terminology stays available.
Related
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