Seeking Alpha Review

As an investor in the stock market, you need all the information you can get to boost your chances of success. Luckily for you, there are numerous investment advice websites available out there. The only problem is that you may have a problem finding the perfect one from all the available options.

In this article, we shall look at the Seeking Alpha service. This is a crowdsourced research platform specially designed with intermediate and advanced traders in mind.

Before you decide to invest in Seeking Alpha, please look at the detailed review we have done on it. In the end, you’ll be better placed to decide whether it has all that you are looking for in an investment advice platform or not.

An Overview of Seeking Alpha

Seeking Alpha is a platform that features news, analysis, and research on the stock market. It is packed with blogs and articles that provide you with an easy way of tracking the stocks that you are monitoring.

The website relies on a crowdsourcing model whereby it draws articles and news headlines that feature expert Wall Street investors and analysts from the internet. 

When you compare this platform to other news services, you find that it is more technical and would suit traders looking to supplement their technical analyses.

NOTE: We currently recommend Motley Fool over Seeking Alpha For stock picks. Learn More >

Who is Behind the Platform?

Seeking Alpha was founded in 2004 by a Wall Street analyst known as David Jackson. As a sell-side analyst during the internet bubble, he noted that his hedge fund clients had a lot of information on stocks than he did.

Further, Jackson noted that most of the small-cap companies were not getting sufficient coverage by Wall Street.

So, he decided to come up with a crowdsourced stock research site. Rather than relying solely on Wall Street analysts’ contributions, the main contributors would be real stock market investors.

He also sought to find a platform that would provide coverage for the small companies which he felt were ignored by Wall Street. 

Over the years, the site has experienced tremendous growth, with over 10-million visitors per month. This is probably due to its partnerships with major global news networks such as MSNBC, CNBC, Yahoo! Finance, and Marketwatch.

What you Get with Seeking Alpha

In this section, we shall look at the key features that make up the platform. This will help you decide whether the platform is worth its price or not.

1. Stock News

This is the backbone of the service whereby reputable investors and analysts contribute their articles to the platform. The articles come with technical language and charts, and this makes them suitable for experienced traders.

In these articles, you can expect to find trading and investment ideas aimed at helping you make sound investment decisions. An important aspect of the articles is that users get different levels of access, depending on their subscription.

If you are a free account holder, you can access the most recent articles within ten days. In contrast, the Essential subscribers will get extra analytical information besides seeing the article itself. Some of this extra information that you get here includes the author’s rating of the stock and an average stock rating across the platform on a chart.

Let’s also touch on StockTalks, which we could equate to financial tweets and aim to promote discussions on particular stocks. These particular stocks are identified by a “$” so that you can search and categorize them like the articles.

Organization of the news content

The news content that this platform provides can be overwhelming. So, Seeking Alpha provides you with an easy way to organize the news so that it is easy for you to find the news and commentary that is relevant to the stocks you are monitoring.

The main ways of accessing the news include:

Via the Homepage

The homepage gives you an easy overview of the entire market. First, there are trending articles and headlines which are available to both free and paid subscribers. Next, you will also get quick quotes for the stocks in your portfolio.

Further down the page are the recommended articles, which are based on portfolio content and the authors you are following.

Lastly, you will get lists with the top gainers and losers in the market and in specific sectors of the economy that you have monitored before.

The Authors you are following

Seeking Alpha allows you to follow certain authors, and when you subscribe to the Essential plan, you can see the stocks that the author covers with their ratings. 

Note that if you want extra analyses and premium articles from the authors, you may have to pay for another subscription service away from the main package.

Your Portfolio

The final way of sorting the news on the website is via the portfolio view. In this method, you can access the articles, StockTalks, and comments on the stocks that you find relevant.

2. Stock Screening Tools

When you subscribe to the premium package, you will get access to a host of screening tools. We have dissected them below in brief:

Stock Screener

In this screener, you can run your custom filters such as a market cap or author rating. Additionally, you could use a premade screen to locate the highest-rated stocks and ETFs. Such screens make it easy for you to find a promising trade.

Dividend Stock Scorecard

The next tool is the dividend stock scorecard, which aims to help you avoid stocks whose returns are unsustainable. You will find this feature to be particularly useful for your long-term investing ideas.

Quant Ratings

Not every investor has an easy time understanding the complex terms and figures used in qualitative analysis to research stocks. So, Seeking Alpha has the Quant Rating system, which is designed to help traders and investors understand the complex figures.

This score is based on various factors, such as:

• EPS revisions
• Growth
• Price momentum
• Value

To get to the stock’s final quant rating, it will have to go through a backtest to find the score.

Factor Scorecard

This platform can also develop a factor whereby it analyzes the underlying stock fundamentals by compiling the stock’s profitability, value, momentum, growth, and EPS revisions. 

The ratings from the factors we have mentioned above range from “A+” to “F.” As you may have guessed, A+ is the best score that the stock can receive. 

Even better is that there is a way to know why a stock received a certain rating, and you can get this information by clicking the letter grade.

3. Portfolio Monitoring

The other aspect of Seeking Alpha that we are going to look at is how it allows you to monitor your portfolio’s performance. We should also point out that there is a variation in the monitoring tools you get access to depending on your subscription plan.

Sync Brokerage Accounts

If you are a premium subscriber with multiple brokerage accounts, this platform allows you to track all your investments in one place. For the free members, the process is a bit tedious, where you have to enter each stock that you intend to track.

News Dashboard

Both basic and premium subscribers can use this platform to read relevant news headlines. However, if you are in the latter group, the news dashboard that you get is fully functional. Here, the investment strategies appear first, plus you get articles for specific industries.

Personalized Alerts

This is a service that allows you to receive breaking news as well as upgrade and downgrade alerts for your portfolio.

Also worth mentioning is that the premium subscribers will find it more advantageous than the basic ones. Rather than having to visit the website to read the alert, you could always do so straight from your mailbox.

Earnings Calendar

Here, you will find a listing of all upcoming calls and reports from the stocks in your portfolio. If you are a premium member, you will get the opportunity to see how the EPS revision scores as the market makes adjustments to recent company reports.

Valuation Metrics

Note that tracking the stock price is not the only way of viewing position performance. You could also do so via specific valuation, fundamental, and author rating metrics.

4. Daily Newsletters

When you subscribe to Seeking Alpha, you will be getting fifteen free newsletters, all of them with different themes. They feature the morning market headlines and also focuses on specific sectors of the economy.

Additionally, each issue provides you with links to different articles from the platform.

5. Marketplace

This is a subscription service that closely resembles an investing newsletter, and it offers you in-depth analysis and model portfolios exclusive to the service.

6. Podcasts

The platform plays host to eight different podcasts that focus on different investment topics. Some of the topics discussed cover ETFs investments, trading stocks, daily market happenings, among others.

7. Investing Strategy

In this section, you will find multiple articles designed to help you boost your general investment strategy. Ordinary investors and financial advisors would find this section to be very useful.

8. Stock Ideas

The Stock Ideas Feed collects different articles depending on the investing themes. Some of the themes that you can search for include:

• Long ideas
• Fund letters
• IPO analysis
• Editors’ picks
• Stock ideas by sector

The Pricing

Let’s start with the Free plan, which is packed with a substantial amount of resources. This includes access to recent articles. However, a lot of crucial information on the articles will be hidden from you. Further, it will be impossible for you to access content that is older than 10-days.

If you want to access more features, you could upgrade to the Essential Plan, which goes for $29.95 per month or $239.88 a year. Here, you get more in-depth analysis, plus you get access to the information that was previously hidden from you, including the author’s stock ratings.

In general, you will get access to all the features that Seeking Alpha has to offer.

The final plan to look at is the Pro+ subscription, which will cost you $299.99 per month or $2399.88 per year. In addition to the features that you get access to in the previous package, you will also get the one-week early access to long and short ideas from the editors. 

Is It Legit?

In general, Seeking Alpha is a reputable service. This is due to the contributors being specialists in their respective fields. However, their credibility varies from one author to the next.

The other thing to talk about is that the articles have an opinion-based component. This implies that even though the contributors rely on facts, they also add their perspectives to the articles. 

There are facts and opinions in every story, and therefore, you are advised to do your own analysis before using the information you pick here to make an investment decision.

Who Is Seeking Alpha Best For?

If you are an investor, an intraday or swing trader, this is a tool that you may find to be very useful. It offers fundamental research and perspectives on specific companies. The articles feature in-depth analyses on different stocks and also features insightful commentary by the users.

Keep in mind that you will need a strong understanding of technical analysis to get the most out of Seeking Alpha. If not, there are simpler options out there that you could try out, such as the Motley Fool Stock Advisor.