Seeking Alpha


Seeking Alpha is a crowd-sourced content service for financial markets. Articles and research covers a broad range of stocks, asset classes, ETFs and investment strategies. In contrast to other equity research platforms, insight is provided by contributor base of investors and industry experts 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, although Yahoo Finance ended its relationship with Seeking Alpha on July 28, 2014.
As of February 2014, the firm had 3 million registered users, and attracted 8 million unique viewers a month.

Contributors

The site's content is generated by independent contributors. Payments for exclusive articles are set at a rate of $13 per 1000 page views, with some articles qualifying for minimum page view guarantees or additional bonuses.
For 2011, the firm was projected to pay its approximately 550 exclusive article contributors $1.2 million.
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, but also future earnings surprises. 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.