Seeking Alpha Review 2023

One of Seeking Alpha’s benefits is the staggering amount of content that is generated: claiming that thousands of authors are contributing hundreds of thousands of articles every month. Much of this content is offered free of charge, but users who can’t get enough data might find use in Seeking Alpha’s “Alpha Premium” subscription plans to get even more info on their hands.

The content on Seeking Alpha is quite varied. Readers can find everything from innovative investing strategies to in-depth analyst ratings (simply by scrolling through the articles!).

However, since the platform has a consortium of contributors, it’s not uncommon to find conflicting opinions & stock analysis. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to conduct research using multiple sources when considering a new investing idea, rather than relying on the investment style and opinions of a single author.

Seeking Alpha Overview

In addition to a variety of free articles on stock tips and market trends, subscribers can purchase Seeking Alpha’s premium package for $239 per year. This paid subscription offers a variety of premium services—such as analytical tools—not available to the firm’s free subscribers.

It should be noted that there is very little hand-holding with this software, and Seeking Alpha offers few educational resources. Seeking Alpha premium’s market software is extensive, but it will require some personal research for you to exercise it to its full potential unless you are already an experienced investor.

If you’re confident in your financial experience, then you might be well served with Seeking Alpha. The company boasts archived stock data that reaches back decades (all while reminding the savvy user that past performance is no promise of future returns).

The myriad of articles and other market advice is both a blessing and a curse. Users will often find conflicting investment ideas & advice. This can overwhelm rookie investors, but experienced subscribers will be able to sort through the great wealth of advice that Seeking Alpha provides to decide what is best for their portfolio parameters and investment goals.

With enough consideration, this can prove to be a benefit to new investors. It might spur them to expand their financial knowledge to reap all that Seeking Alpha has to offer. For the ambitious type of investor, Seeking Alpha can be a viable option for making informed investment decisions.

Membership Options

Basic Membership

This basic plan is entirely free, requiring only an email account. It’s the ideal option for investors who are still learning about investing, as it provides access to content with limited restrictions.

It’s also a good choice for people who’ve never used Seeking Alpha before. The basic plan will give you an idea of the content/information you can expect from the platform without requiring you to commit to an ongoing membership fee.

After creating a free account, you’ll have instant access to the basic Seeking Alpha features, including:

• Limited content access
• Email alerts
• News updates
• Stock pricing & charts
• Wall Street Stock Ratings

Premium Membership

The main benefit of Seeking Alpha Premium subscription service is access to premium content. Limited access Alpha Premium articles often contain critical information not available in general-audience articles. As a paid Alpha Premium subscriber, you’ll also enjoy additional information outside of the exclusive content, including:

• Seeking Alpha Author Ratings
• Seeking Alpha Author Performance
• Stock Quant Ratings
• Stock Dividend Grades

These Premium features have a lot to offer to the average investor. The first two features mentioned above—-Author Ratings and Author Performance—-help the reader determine the validity of any article they read.

“Author Ratings” is used as a way to evaluate the quality of an author’s content. These are determined from a number of different factors including the relevance of an author’s content, the quality of their analysis, and the accuracy of their predictions.

Without Author Ratings, readers wouldn’t be able to differentiate a trusted author from a questionable one. However, thanks to this feature, readers can easily identify the authors whose content they should be reading (and ignore the ones whose work isn’t worth reading).

“Author Performance” also serves as a way to evaluate an author, but it evaluates accuracy (rather than the content itself). This metric tracks the author’s recommendations, comparing them to the historical performance of their stock picks and making it easy for readers to see how accurate their predictions usually are.

“Quant Ratings” is Seeking Alpha’s proprietary grading system for stocks. The system works on an algorithm that rates stocks on a scale of 1 to 100 based on the available quantitative data.

To assign a rating, the algorithm gathers data from a variety of sources—including market trends and financial statements—then compares this data against various factors to assign a rating

Relevant factors include (but are not limited to): price momentum, earnings growth, revenue growth, and value. Quant Ratings are updated every day in the morning, making them extremely useful to both short and long-term investors.

“Dividend Grades” won’t be much help to day traders, but they’re extremely useful to those who hope to make money in the long term by utilizing dividend returns. These grades serve to evaluate the quality of a company’s dividend program using a variety of different factors.

Relevant factors include the dividend yield, a company’s historical record of paying (or not paying) dividends, earnings estimates, and the likelihood that a company will continue to pay dividends in an economic downturn.

PRO Membership

Suppose you’re a fundamental investor with a lot of capital to invest. In that case, becoming an Alpha Pro subscriber may be a worthwhile endeavor! Seeking Alpha Pro is expensive—coming in at $200/month—but aims to streamline your investments by only providing the best stock recommendations (alongside a few additional features).

As a Seeking Alpha subscriber, you’ll still have unlimited access to all the exclusive content offered with a Premium membership. However, Pro members are instantly presented with the “Top Ideas,” which are articles that SA considers highly viable and instantly actionable. In addition to Top Ideas, Alpha Pro also provides the following benefits:

• Seeking Alpha PRO content
• Seeking Alpha PRO newsletters
• Short ideas portal
• Idea screener & filter
• VIP Service

Features

Seeking Alpha has a lot to offer the premium subscriber, including fundamental analysis tools, investing strategies, exclusive content, and market insights. There are far too many features to include in this article, but we’ve included some notable mentions below.

Articles

Articles are one of the key features offered by Seeking Alpha; arguably, they are the heart of the Seeking Alpha community! Many different topics are covered on the platform, from fundamental analysis and portfolio investment strategy to investment ideas and market news.

Casual investors can take advantage of investment advice; more advanced investors can mull over in-depth research to make their own decisions. The extensive library of available content makes the platform suitable for nearly any investing style.

That said, the platform receives contributions from both amateur and professional investors. As such, opinions often conflict, advice may be incorrect, and articles could be biased. Because of this, it’s important that traders take a close look at each proposed portfolio investment strategy or analysis. Doing so will allow them to make informed decisions regarding their investment portfolios.

Article Sidebar

The platform has created the “Article Sidebar” to help you determine which Seeking Alpha contributors align with your investment philosophy. This sidebar includes a stock price chart, stock information, author rating, and author history.

Author ratings are designed to help you differentiate between non-credible and credible authors. Each Seeking Alpha author receives a rating: bullish, neutral, or bearish. However, author ratings don’t reflect the actual quality of a contributor’s content.

Seeking Alpha Quant Rating

Seeking Alpha offers a proprietary quantitative (“Quant”) rating on various assets since its introduction in 2010. The platform’s ratings span from strong sell, sell, hold, buy, to strong buy. Seeking Alpha claims that a portfolio based around securities rated as a “strong-buy” would outperform the S&P 500’s returns by over $130,000 (assuming a $10,000 initial deposit). This would amount to over a 27% return, far better than average market performance.

Factor Grading

Currently, Seeking Alpha offers factor scorecards for over 5,600 individual stocks. These scorecards are made up of five different factor grades: Valuation, Growth, Profitability, Momentum, and Revisions.

Factor grades are useful for both short-term and long-investors, as it allows them to get a comprehensive overview of a particular stock with just a single glance. Scorecards are updated once per day, and are limited to premium/pro subscribers. In addition to the current factor grades, you can also see a stock’s grades three and six months ago.

Proprietary Stock Screener

If you’re in the process of stock picking and stock market analysis, then stock screeners can be particularly useful. One of the things that make Seeking Alpha stock screeners particularly useful is that—in addition to the standard stock data—they also include stock ratings and author analysis.

The main page of the stock screener will provide you with pre-made screening lists. “Top Rated Stocks” includes SA’s stock recommendations. Since—unlike Motley Fool Stock Advisor—Seeking Alpha doesn’t provide a constant stream of recommendations, these lists are as close as you’re going to get to company-provided stock picks.

“Top Rated Dividend Stocks,” “Top Growth Stocks,” and “Top Technology Stocks” are just a few of the other pre-made lists. You can also make your own custom stock screener if you’d prefer.

Portfolio Alerts & Monitoring

It can be easy to miss critical information, even if you’re reading the stock charts every day. Unfortunately, if you can’t closely keep track of a share price, it’s easy to make detrimental investment decisions by accident. Fortunately, Seeking Alpha can help prevent this by sending you email alerts!

The platform can be synced to your favorite brokerage, providing real-time information about all of your assets. This helps streamline the entire investing process, as you can factor in stock-related news while using the platform’s various comparison tools to create a balanced stock portfolio.

Podcasts & Newsletters

If you prefer a more personable approach to investing ideas, then the podcasts & newsletters may appeal to you. They both cover a variety of topics, including stock analysis, market news, earnings expectations, and investing ideas.

Podcasts are extremely convenient to access as they can be streamed from the website, via Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify. Release frequency varies, but you can generally expect to have at least one new podcast to listen to per day.

Newsletters vary a bit more, as there are a number of different newsletters you can subscribe to. Which ones you’ll have access to will vary (depending on your subscription level).

Additional Market Coverage

Although Seeking Alpha is best known for its great coverage of the stock market, this online investment community covers other asset types as well.

Thanks to its thousands of contributor articles and various tools, readers can also use the service to search commodities, real estate, forex, mutual funds, IPOs, REITs, ETFs (exchange-traded funds), bonds, and even cryptocurrencies!

Coverage (articles, news updates, analysis, screeners, etc.) for each of these asset types varies, but should offer you enough information and insight for you to be able to make informed decisions.

Here are a few examples to give you an idea of the coverage you can expect:

• Bonds are covered in various analytical articles which cover topics such as yield spreaders, credit ratings, and interest rate movements. Seeking Alpha covers a number of different bond types including corporate, municipal, and government bonds.
• Commodities—which include precious metals—also receive analytical article coverage, which primarily focuses on factors that affect the market (such as supply and demand). You can also find news articles about events that could have an effect on the value of commodities.
• Cryptocurrencies receive more in-depth attention, allowing investors to read articles about the latest cryptocurrency news & investor analysis as well as having access to charts.

Customer Reviews and Reputation of Seeking Alpha

Seeking Alpha has established a strong reputation as a leading platform for financial information and market insights. This reputation is reflected in the positive customer reviews it has received on various platforms such as TrustPilot and Getapp. With an overall rating of 4.2 out of 5 on TrustPilot and 4.5 out of 5 on Getapp, as of the time of writing, it’s clear that users find value in the services provided by Seeking Alpha.

The legitimacy of Seeking Alpha is well-established. It’s a verified company with a broad user base that includes individual investors, financial advisors, and market professionals. The platform is known for its comprehensive coverage of stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, and other financial instruments. It provides a wealth of information that users can leverage to make informed investment decisions.

The overall theme from the reviews indicates that users appreciate the depth and breadth of information available on Seeking Alpha. Users have praised the platform for its user-friendly interface and the ease with which they can navigate through large amounts of information. The ability to create and track a portfolio, follow daily news and events, and access participant articles are among the features that users find most valuable.

Users also appreciate the timeliness of the information provided by Seeking Alpha. The platform is seen as a valuable resource for individual investors seeking to stay informed about the latest developments that could impact their investments. The wealth of knowledge available on the platform, particularly on the Premium site, is frequently highlighted in reviews.

However, users also caution that, like any resource, the quality and veracity of the information should always be checked. This is a reminder that while Seeking Alpha provides a wealth of information, it’s important for users to conduct their own due diligence and consider multiple sources of information when making investment decisions.

Below are some of the full reviews that reflect these sentiments:

Who is Seeking Alpha Best for?

Seeking Alpha is an excellent resource for investors who are looking to deepen their understanding of the stock market and expand their investment portfolios. However, the platform caters to different types of investors with varying levels of experience and interests. Here are the groups of people who may benefit the most from Seeking Alpha:

• Intermediate to Advanced Investors: Seeking Alpha’s in-depth analysis and diverse opinions on stocks, market trends, and investment strategies cater to those who already have a solid understanding of the stock market. The platform provides valuable insights for investors looking to make informed decisions on their investments. However, it may be overwhelming for beginners who are just starting to learn about investing.
• DIY Investors: Investors who prefer to do their own research and make their own investment decisions will find Seeking Alpha’s wealth of content and tools invaluable. The platform offers a variety of articles, stock screeners, and Quant ratings that help investors create a well-rounded investment strategy tailored to their preferences and risk tolerance.
• Investors Interested in Diverse Assets: Seeking Alpha covers a wide range of assets beyond stocks, including bonds, commodities, cryptocurrencies, and more. Investors looking to diversify their portfolios across different asset classes can use the platform to research and analyze various investment opportunities.
• Long-Term and Income Investors: Seeking Alpha’s Dividend Grades and coverage of dividend stocks cater to investors who prioritize stable, long-term returns and income generation. Additionally, the platform’s in-depth analysis of market trends and company fundamentals can help long-term investors make informed decisions based on a company’s potential for growth and stability.
• Active Community Members: One of the key strengths of Seeking Alpha is its active community of investors and contributors. Investors who enjoy discussing and debating investment ideas with others can participate in the platform’s comment sections, where they can share their thoughts, ask questions, and learn from others’ perspectives.

On the other hand, Seeking Alpha may not be the best choice for:

• Absolute Beginners: While Seeking Alpha does provide some educational content, the platform may be overwhelming for those who are entirely new to investing. Beginners might find other platforms with more structured educational resources and guidance more suitable for their needs.
• Investors Focused on Mutual Funds: Seeking Alpha’s primary focus is on individual stocks and other assets. While there is some coverage of mutual funds, investors who are exclusively interested in this type of investment may find other platforms with more extensive mutual fund research and analysis more beneficial.

Seeking Alpha Pros

A Free Option – Users who aren’t quite sure if Seeking Alpha is the direction they want to go in can take full advantage of the firm’s free services. This can help you dip your toe in the water to see if the company’s general language and way of disseminating information might be something you’d be interested in paying for additional access to.

Community – Seeking Alpha is unique compared to other robo investors in the sheer amount of investment ideas & content its users contribute. One might even consider it a sort of Seeking Alpha Reddit community all its own. You can find input from investors of all experience levels and financial goals, so you’ll always find a like-minded individual to help you on your path.

Accessibility – The firm offers a variety of ways to engage with the market. Seeking Alpha has a way to log in as long as you have internet access. It offers both a desktop and mobile application, so you can always be plugged into the market.

Seeking Alpha Cons

Not for Rookies – Seeking Alpha is not made for the beginning investor. Between the desktop display and the way technical analysis information is presented, users will not be spoon-fed. Using the platform will require a background in investing or at least a willingness to learn more outside of the resources that the firm provides immediately.

Limited Free Content – While there is plenty to dig through on Seeking Alpha’s basic site, much of what makes the company interesting is reserved for premium investors. Unique features such as the Quant rating system and access to content authors’ recommendation performances are all reserved for paying members.

Seeking Alpha’s free basic version might be seen as more of a trial for those thinking of a paid subscription as opposed to something to completely rely on.

Is Seeking Alpha Worth It?

Seeking Alpha is an excellent choice for active research-driven investors with moderate experience who have a moderate amount of money to invest regularly. A premium plan might be too much for those who only plan on investing small amounts of money at a time, meaning that they can’t properly capitalize on all of the information that the platform has to offer. We also wouldn’t recommend Seeking Alpha for those purely interested in investing in mutual funds.

If you enjoy researching individual securities, and you are a serious, active trader with multiple individual stocks, then Seeking Alpha can prove to be a worthy investment all its own.

If you decide that Seeking Alpha is right for you, you can get started here! For a limited time, you can get a 50% discount!