Description
Free website that aggregates blog content and submitted stories from authors, including both professional and amateur analysts.
Overall Rating
Rating: 2.7/5. From 21 votes.
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3.0
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Investment Performance
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Rating: 2.9/5. From 37 votes.
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Quality Of Writing/Analysis
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Rating: 3.0/5. From 29 votes.
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Value For Price
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Rating: 3.4/5. From 29 votes.
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Customer Service
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Rating: 2.7/5. From 21 votes.
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Seeking Alpha gives a lot of information on the various stocks, ETF’s, and Mutual Funds. They seem to be quite objective, as well as informative and concise. There is no subscription cost for the majority of the service, and you can get daily information on select companies you may be interested in.
EYoung
Another FREE gift to those of us interested in “fleshed out” reviews of every kind of investment out there.
Had it not been for SA, I probably would not have discovered Chris Ciovacco. While I can’t afford to hire this Atlanta based money mgr., his market instincts almost parallel my own views most of the time.
http://www.ciovaccocapital.com/sys-tmpl/2009investmentoutlook/
http://www.ciovaccocapital.com/sys-tmpl/investmentresearch/
SA also ranks their contributing analysts by 4 categories, & most of these folks provide both email addresses & tel.#’s to reach them.
I read this publication every morning as it further educates & enlightens me.
Like Gumshoe.com it deserves 5 ***** in my book.
SA is great. Lots to read and a lot of political opinions. After I while you select the contributors you like and you get an email with only their contributions. This is great and free. You have excellent contributors.
I subscribed to Seeking Alpha about 6 months ago. I am relatively new to investing and only have about 15 years left to retirement, so I was looking for unbiased articles that would help me educate myself on investing. I am very pleased with the quality of the most of the articles and the comments posted by members about the articles. These give you many views of the company or investment talked about in the article and many times include links to reports or other articles about the topic. I have learned a lot by reading Seeking Alpha daily!
I have invested in some stocks based on articles I have read in seeking alpha, some good, some bad. But I don’t blame Seeking Alpha as I didn’t do enough due diligence before buying two of the bad ones. I bought Dryships on an article and didn’t follow up with DD and lost 84% after two months. The best two were Tepco (TPP) and Medarex (MDX). I started buying Tepco back in Dec 2008 after an article about MLP’s mentioned it as the best value for the Yield of over 8%. Tepco just completed a merger with Enterprise Partners in which I received 1.24 shares of EPD for every share of Tepco. I realized a 24% Gain on the switch to EPD stock which I plan on holding long term. On Medarex I saw a news article about the startling performance of a drug in prostate cancer trials. I researched the company on Seeking Alpha and found Mike Harvilla’s BioMedReports articles and blogs. I immediately bought 20 shares on 6/26/09 and held it for 20 days and sold after the announcement that Bristol-Meyers was buying Medarex. I realized an 82% gain.
my only experience with seeking alpha was that they ran old negative news as though it was new, I was looking for why a stock was down found there news item posted that day. After talking with a friend he pointed out that it was written by a short seller that had released this “news” 4 months earlier also. Be careful…
Just interested in free writers.Could are less about the quality of content and does no backround checks on the authors
Seeking Alpha covers a wide range of topics, is informative and entertaining. I can’t give it five stars because the articles are not vetted at all. Any whacko can post any disinformation he wants. The quality of contributions is all over the map.
It’s great value for money: it’s free!
Customer service? I don’t think there is any.
Consistency? On a free-for-all website, consistency doesn’t even signify.
The power of Seeking Alpha is that anyone can log in and comment on any article. And they do; from all over the world!
When an article intrigues me, I need only wait a few hours for the reader posts to emerge to help me sort fact from fiction. Misinformed or misleading writers are quickly put in their place, usually with a civil, well argued rebuke. Often, the readers’s comments are as educational as the articles.
For the most part, the tone of the reader’s comments is pretty high. Of course anything can happen on an open blog, so reader beware.
This is one of the worst financial web sites I’ve ever seen. They allow people to post the most ridiculous and stupid comments, and when you complain about it, they block you. The customer service people are complete idiots. Morons like “entmd” show just how pathetic this web site really is.
Seeking Alpha has its plus and minus aspects, but overall I found it to be a good aid to my financial education. There are some very good and reliable commentators and some that are terrible but the comments that quickly follow any article always set things straight, whether that’s substantiating the author’s pov or tearing it apart.
I am an ex-contributor on seeking alpha – warning to anyone else who writes on that site: if they want to they will screw you over!
One of my articles was wildly successful and they refused to pay me for it (a couple of months after it had been up on the site) because of some “non-genuine” page views. When queried as to what they were referring to, no evidence was provided. I think they are desperate to show a working biz model before they cash out with an IPO.
They bombard you with their emails so that I soon unsubscribed which did not help, as they ignore the request. Now they flood my spam box!
Seeking Alpha allows practically anyone to post articles which makes it a dangerous website. Recently an article appeared dicing MJNA stock, questioning its financial veracity. Next day, MJNA released its quarterly earnings. The previous article written bya short-seller instantly disappeared from the website. The suckers who sold out their shares were contributing to the welfare of the short-seller. So, read with your eyes and your mind open. Everything you read there is not legit.
On Time Tech and Eunice Braam are right on the money. I commented on a few treads over at Seeking Alpha just to reintroduce some common sense as the crazy are allowed/encouraged to run wild and free. Soon my comments were blocked. Fine – their site, their rules. No issues with that.
Then I tried to unsubscribe. But because there is no cancellation/unsubscribe feature I contacted customer support. Bad mistake. They do not want you to cancel for some reason. Perhaps they try to show membership numbers to future investors in Seeking Alpha? Don’t know…
Some articles were interesting to read but the overall feedback is a resounding: STAY AWAY!
Seeking Alpha is not a good source of information in general. They have the good, the bad and the ugly. A bag of information. Not all writers are credible. Some writers I come across who write to lure you into their services. So what he writes is really not for the benefit of the reader, but for himself. I do not recommend it.
Judging by some of the comments above, many readers just don’t understand the function of the site. It isn’t run by a single purveyor of advice, like the Motley Fool or Stansberry organizations. Rather, it’s an open forum where anyone with an informative point of view can submit a blog. The editors can’t possibly vet all the authors, but will reject articles that are obvious frauds or just irrational.
This is NOT a site for novice investors to get advice. It’s more like an open-air market where you go to get specific items of information on specific investments from authors you read with some skepticism until you have checked them out and have gained confidence in their analyses.
The variety of opinions of both authors and commenters is what gives the site value. For instance if you are thinking of buying stock in Apple you will find dozens of articles on AAPL dating from today or yesterday back over months. You must sift through the data, opinions, and comments to reach your own conclusions. That’s called “due diligence”.
Over the years I’ve gleaned many ideas about how different sectors work in relation to the overall economy, the relationship between buying ETFs and picking individual stocks, how technical analysis works, the over-riding importance of investor sentiment, the relationship of fundamentals to all the other factors involved in successful investing, and much more.
Also interesting is that you can usually judge the quality of a blog by the quality of the comments. Some authors get comments from readers who obviously know what they are talking about. Others not so much. So you read critically and keep digging.
I have followed SA offand on for many years. Occasionally, there is useful insight. All too often it feels like “shorts” talking their book, whether or not they admit it.
Sorry I just get the free stuff here and I find a well balanced cross section of opinions and outlooks.
Be very careful about taking out a subscription with any of the contributors. Once they have your card information they will charge and keep charging. There is minimal customer service so good luck ever getting any help from them
Extremely poor functionality. In essence, I am paying a lot of money for subscriptions that do not work!
Customer service is atrocious and that’s me being kind. If you are going to test their service, use Amex as they almost always on your side. I tested a service that supposedly had a 30 day free trial. Tried to cancel but no response. Called Amex and they intervened, refunded my fees. Stay away from these crooks