About Seeking Alpha

Seeking Alpha is the premier financial website for actionable stock market opinion and analysis. We handpick articles from the world's top market blogs, money managers, financial experts and investment newsletters - publishing approximately 175 articles daily. Seeking Alpha gives a voice to over 2000 contributors, providing access to the nation's most savvy and inquisitive investors.  Our site is the only free, online source for over 3,000 public companies' quarterly earnings call transcripts, including all of the Russell 3000 Index.  Seeking Alpha was named the Most Informative Website by Kiplinger's Magazine and has received Forbes' 'Best of the Web' Award. Our editorial process:

  • First, we select only the most interesting articles from over 400 regular contributors and submitted items (approximately 25% of new authors are accepted).
  • Then, we edit articles for clarity and consistency.
  • Finally, we organize and tag articles so they can be easily found and subscribed to by stock ticker, sector and theme.

To make Seeking Alpha a one-stop-shop for stock research, we then add our one page daily summary of top market and stock related stories (Wall Street Breakfast),  thousands of quarterly earnings call transcripts in our Transcript Center, daily summaries of Jim Cramer's stock picks, comprehensive coverage of new IPO filings, and a regular housing market roundup. Our new Market Currents provides real time, dynamic commentary on the market all day long.

Seeking Alpha differs from other finance sites because it focuses on opinion and analysis rather than news, and is primarily written by investors who describe their personal approach to stock picking and portfolio management, rather than by journalists. (More about our contributors.)

Seeking Alpha has a strong readership among money managers, research analysts, investment bankers, and serious individual investors.  'Alpha' is a finance term referring to a stock's performance relative to the market; it's used more loosely by fund managers to describe beating their index - so every stock picker is essentially "seeking alpha."

Editorial Principles

Seeking Alpha's editors are tasked with selecting outstanding articles from credible authors and editing them for clarity, consistency and impact. Editors follow the following criteria in deciding whether or not to accept an article for publication:

  1. The author must agree in writing to abide by Seeking Alpha's disclosure standards.
  2. Articles must interest our readership. The key criterion we use is: Does the article help a fundamentally-oriented investor decide whether to buy or sell the stock in question? Specifically, does it provide meaningful information about or analysis of the company's competitive environment, management, products, corporate strategy, earnings potential or balance sheet? This definition excludes pure technical (chart) analysis of stocks.
  3. Articles must conform to Seeking Alpha's standards of rigor and clarity.
  4. Articles may not focus on stocks that trade below $1.00, as they are most subject to manipulation.

Seeking Alpha does not allow its editors to accept or reject an article due to the stock covered (other than the $1.00 rule above) or the editor's agreement or disagreement with the contributor's viewpoint on the stock.

This means that the stocks featured on Seeking Alpha, and whether the articles published about them are bullish or bearish, are effectively determined by our contributing authors (once they satisfy our quality and integrity criteria) and not by our editors. Editorial changes to articles are intended to clarify the author's viewpoint and may not interfere with the substance of the author's argument or viewpoint. Our strict adherence to these editorial guidelines means that Seeking Alpha authors are genuinely independent.

In keeping with this authorial independence, authors are required to disclose personal positions in stocks they write about. Because Seeking Alpha's editors have no input into which stocks are covered or the nature of the commentary on them, they are not required to disclose positions in articles they edit.

Contributors

Seeking Alpha has published articles from over 2000 contributors and actively monitors over 400 authors.  The majority are finance professionals, and many have their own blogs. All contributors bring what we believe to be a unique slant and rigor to their work.  We strongly favor contributions from finance professionals and industry experts writing about their own sectors, but we are open to any article that is carefully argued, informative and well-written. We expect money managers to hold positions in stocks they write about, and require them to agree in writing to Seeking Alpha's compliance standards.

Benefits to Contributors

  • Hedge Fund Managers. Seeking Alpha offers hedge fund managers a way to build their reputations and receive feedback and publicity for their stock ideas. We don't mind if you have a position in a stock you are writing about -- in fact, we like people with "skin in the game" -- but you must conform to Seeking Alpha's compliance standards. The easiest way for many hedge fund managers to submit content to Seeking Alpha is to send us your letter to limited partners if it contains a discussion of one or more of your positions.
  • Newsletter Authors. Seeking Alpha is an ideal venue for newsletter authors to publicise the quality of their work to attract new subscribers. Excerpts from your newsletter submitted to Seeking Alpha for publication must be genuinely helpful to our readers as they search for analysis by stock ticker. Our editors are ruthless in rejecting newsletter content that fails to meet our quality standards or is over-promotional in tone or substance. As a result, excerpts which are published on Seeking Alpha are an excellent advertisement for your newsletter.

Who Reads Seeking Alpha?

  • Money Managers and the Sell-Side. Seeking Alpha is an important research tool for money managers, sell-side sales professionals and research analysts. When you type a stock symbol into the search box at the top of the page, we aim to provide: (1) a range of well-argued opinions about the stock by money managers, bloggers and newsletters; (2) annotated summaries of important stories about the stock from the Wall Street Journal and Barron's; (3) transcripts of the most recent conference calls; (4) coverage of competitors who may have filed IPOs recently; and (5) charts showing the stock's comparative performance and valuation to others in its sector. Many money managers also subscribe to Seeking Alpha articles by email. By signing up for our free email service, you can get articles about stocks in your portfolio and on your watch list automatically sent to you. Our daily Annotated Wall Street Journal Summary is also immensely popular with money managers.
  • Investment Bankers. Seeking Alpha provides deep and broad coverage of new IPO filings and has a section devoted to M&A. Many investement bankers also subscribe by email to articles about their clients' stocks and sectors.
  • Industry Executives. Because of the depth of our content and its arrangement by sector, Seeking Alpha is an important resource for managers and entrepreneurs to follow and analyze developments in their industry. Thousands of participants in the Internet industry, for example, follow our coverage of Internet stocks due to the richness of information including conference call transcripts of almost every publicly-traded Internet company, coverage of smaller companies, and comprehensiveness. Most of these readers access our industry-specific content in one of three ways: bookmarking the relevant industry section of the Seeking Alpha site, subscribing to the RSS feed for that sector, or signing up to receive sector-related articles by email.
  • Individual Investors. Seeking Alpha provides opinion and analysis, not just news. Many individual investors subscribe by email to articles about stocks in their portfolio, and regularly read our coverage of sectors they are interested in, such as gold or energy. Two broader areas are also particularly popular with individual investors: our coverage of exchange-traded funds [ETFs] and our discussion of the overall market. And many individuals like to follow our commentary on the housing market, and also follow Sound Money Tips, our personal finance website that publishes one short personal finance tip every day.

Seeking Alpha's History and Founder

Seeking Alpha was founded by David Jackson, who worked for five years as a technology research analyst for Morgan Stanley in New York covering the communications equipment sector. He left in early 2003 to manage money (long/short) and explore new approaches to financial publishing. After publishing an online book about investing with ETFs, he launched Seeking Alpha in early 2004. Seeking Alpha has since grown to be the top destination for stock market opinion and analysis on the Internet, and is widely read by finance professionals and serious individual investors. Seeking Alpha has grown into a full-fledged company with professional editors and web developers.

Seeking Alpha's Technology and Platform

Seeking Alpha's web publishing platform is customized for financial content. Each article is carefully categorized, allowing readers to quickly view related articles by stock ticker, sector or theme. Seeking Alpha's free email subscriptions allow readers to subscribe to email by the same categories. (Many fund managers, for example, subscribe to Seeking Alpha articles on stocks in their portfolios or watch lists.) Contributors can also submit articles to Seeking Alpha's editors via the website.

November 16, 2008   |  Last Updated       06:42 ET
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