Question 1

What is the bank consensus board?

Accepted Answer

The bank consensus board is a per-pair view of where investment banks see each currency heading this week, aggregated across 37 institutional research desks. For every major and EM pair it shows the consensus target (the median level where the desks see the pair going), the forecast low–high range, the number of desks contributing, how tightly those desks agree, and the percentage move from current spot to the consensus target. It is an aggregate, citable snapshot — the cross-desk picture rather than any single house view — so you can read at a glance where the sell side is leaning and how contested that call is.

Question 2

What does the consensus target, range and agreement mean?

Accepted Answer

The consensus target is the central (median) level where the contributing desks expect the pair to trade by their forecast horizon — the single best summary of the aggregate view. The range is the spread between the lowest and highest desk targets for that pair, showing the full breadth of published opinion. Agreement describes how tightly the individual targets cluster around the consensus: high agreement means the desks largely concur, while low agreement means the call is contested and the dispersion is wide. The move percentage translates the consensus target into a directional read versus current spot, so you can see both where the banks point and how far that is from today.

Question 3

How is consensus agreement measured?

Accepted Answer

Consensus agreement is derived from the dispersion of the individual desk targets around the consensus level for each pair. When the contributing forecasts sit close together, the spread is narrow and agreement reads as high; when they scatter widely, the spread is large and agreement reads as low. Each pair on the board is also gated by a minimum desk count, so a consensus is only shown once enough independent desks contribute for the aggregate to be meaningful and for no single desk’s view to be reverse-engineered. Measuring agreement this way turns the raw disagreement between banks into a usable signal about how confident the institutional consensus really is.

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Bank Consensus

Consensus by Pair