Seeking Alpha

Seeking Alpha is a crowd-sourced content service for financial markets. Articles and research covers a broad range of stocks, asset classes, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and investment strategies. Unlike other equity research platforms, insight is provided by contributors including a base of investors and industry experts ( buy side) rather than sell side. Seeking Alpha was founded in 2004 by former Wall Street analyst David Jackson.

In 2011 the company stated it had distribution partnerships with MSN Money, CNBC, Yahoo! Finance, MarketWatch, NASDAQ and TheStreet. Yahoo Finance ended its relationship with Seeking Alpha on July 28, 2014.

As of January 2021, the firm self-reported that it had 10 million registered users and attracts over 17 million unique viewers every month. Its average visit duration was 4× more than ''The Economist'', ''Barron's'' or the ''Wall Street Journal.''

Contributors

The site's content is primarily generated by independent contributors. As of January 2021, compensation for exclusive articles is determined by how many Premium and PRO subscribers read any given article, with additional compensation for articles on under covered tickers.

In 2011, the firm was projected to pay its approximately 550 exclusive article contributors $1.2 million. In January 2021, the company reported that it has over 16,000 contributors who publish over 7,000 articles and transcripts every month and that it covers 8,000 tickers and has an archive of over 1 million articles.

Notable contributors include Henry Blodget and Paco Ahlgren.

''Wisdom of Crowds''

In 2014, the ''Review of Financial Studies'' published ''Wisdom of Crowds: The Value of Stock Opinions Transmitted Through Social Media''. Researchers from City University of Hong Kong, Purdue University and Georgia Institute of Technology analyzed approximately 100,000 Seeking Alpha articles and commentary published between 2005 and 2012. The researchers looked at the ability of Seeking Alpha articles to predict not only future stock returns (a variable susceptible to influence by analysts' published opinions), but also future earnings surprises (a variable unlikely to be influenced by published opinions). The authors found that views expressed in Seeking Alpha articles, as well as reader commentaries on those articles, did predict future stock returns over every time-frame examined, from one month to three years. Articles and reader commentaries also predicted earning surprises.

Reception

In 2013, ''Wired'' named Seeking Alpha one of the "core nutrients of a good data diet."
In 2007, Seeking Alpha received a Forbes' Best of the Web designation and was selected by Kiplinger's as Best Investment Informant. In 2011 Seeking Alpha Market Currents was listed as number one in Constantine von Hoffman's list of Essential Economic blogs.

Allegations of Market Manipulation

Seeking Alpha has been alleged to be a platform for market manipulators. Given Seeking Alpha's popularity, some investors take advantage of it to manipulate the market for their benefit. To do so, they typically post highly negative news or analysis about a company and their stock, urging the readers to sell their shares and not to buy any new shares, causing a rapid decline in the stock price by the readers rushing to sell their shares. They expect that this will create a lower entry point for them to buy the stock in the near future and they will profit once their biased and misrepresented article is rebutted. Some other investors will also short the stock before they post their negative article, profiting both by the initial decline of the stock price and its subsequent near-future rise by regaining its possession at a lower price.

Subscriptions

The freemium platform announced Dec. 31, 2020 that it would expand its paywall on its content. Its premium content subscription, which previously put a group of specific articles and authors behind a paywall within 7-14 days after initial publishing, would now have a monthly limit on how many articles could be read for free without a subscription. Effective Jan. 4, 2021, a free user can access 5 articles a month without paying; after that they would be asked to subscribe to Seeking Alpha Premium. The cost of the plan, as of Feb. 7, 2021, was $19.99 per month billed annually or $29.99 billed monthly. In the Dec. 31, 2020 announcement, David Jackson, founder and CEO, and Daniel Hochman, vice president of product, wrote that "more than 70,000+ investors have already subscribed to Premium and have unlimited access to all that Seeking Alpha Premium has to offer."

See also

* Alpha (finance)
* Value Line
* Security analysis
* Securities research
* Stock valuation
* Financial analyst

References

External links

* {{official website

Financial services companies established in 2004
Economics websites
Online publishing companies of the United States
Securities (finance)
Finance websites