Mardi 13 Décembre 2022
Laurent Leloup

Is Seeking Alpha cost worth it: meme stock subscription or value for the money?

The investment news service has a good track record, but we looked at a number of categories in this crowded space to find the answer to the question: is the Seeking Alpha cost worth it?


This Seeking Alpha review summarizes:

- What Sets it Apart
- Competitors
- Price
- What’s Included
- What’s Free
- Social media Seeking Alpha reviews
- Value of information
- Customer comments

Summary
Seeking Alpha is an in-depth stock analysis subscription service.

It provides investment news consumers with:
-Proven stock ratings
-Market research
-Real-time portfolio warnings
-Stock screeners
-Expert author analysis
-a seven-day free trial
-Claims it stock recommendations beat the market 4 to 1

Paying subscribers have access to extensive additional analysis that cover the following:
-Market Outlook
-Dividends
-EFTs
-Inflation

Within those categories, authors cover a variety of industries in-depth. They are grouped into a number of categories:
- Dividend, Income Investing and REITs
- Growth and GARP
- Value and Deep Value
- Activists, Special Situations and Event Driven
- Financials
- Oil & Gas, Energy, Natural Resources
- Economy, Macro and Forex
- Consumer and Industrial
- Technology, Software and the Internet
- Portfolio Strategy, Retirement and ETFs
- Gold, Precious Metals and Miners
- Healthcare and Biotech

Because a hallmark of the site is its analyst commentators, users can bookmark their favorite authors and stocks. It keeps a list of “star contributors.”

What Sets it Apart
Seeking Alpha attracts a massive amount of visitors and followers each month. It is best known for its variety of in-depth analyst opinions.

Additionally, it was studied as part of the book published in 2014 the Wisdom of Crowds: The Value of Stock Opinions Transmitted Through Social Media. During the period studied, which ranged from one month to three years, it found articles and reader commentary did provide accurate predictions of stock returns and earning surprises.

Seeking Alpha writers are also not “writers,” they have vetted trader analysts who engage financially and intellectually with the market every day.

Seeking Alpha also has written commentary on a broader range of stocks. Not just the big, commonly discussed trades. Its authors look for outliers, and disruptors who may make it big in the next few years.

Competitors
Seeking Alpha competes with Morningstar and the Motley Fool subscription services. Each service tailors to a specific audience, and in this case it does appear that the answer to the question of, “Is the Seeking Alpha cost worth it?” is yes.

When compared to Morningstar, Seeking Alpha didn’t compete entirely - Morningstar is seen as more conservative and specifically valuable for ETF analysis. Morningstar reports are also embedded into Fidelity and TD Ameritrade platforms at no charge for certain customers.

Motley Fool is more tailored toward the lighthearted and perhaps less seasoned investors just getting into the market. Motley Fool provides a lot of information, but also emails a lot of information and goes hard into the upsell for subscribers.

Seeking Alpha also goes hard for the upsell into its subscription services, but it does provide a few analyses at no charge. It also lets readers look at headlines and summaries quickly before guiding them to the signup page. Seeking Alpha reports in-depth on a large range of stocks with a tone interpreted as a bit more serious.

Seeking Alpha sets itself apart with its in a few ways: its origination as a crowdsourced financial commentary platform, the large amount of content, and the amount of time the platform has existed. Morningstar, the Motley Fool, and Seeking Alpha all have advantages and disadvantages, but for the detailed investor, Seeking Alpha should be considered the leader.

Price
Two subscription levels allow access to premium content, Premium and PRO. For a limited time, Modest Money readers can get a 50 percent discount.

>>>Click HERE for more information

Premium content includes:
- Unlimited articles
-Author ratings
-Author comments
-Ad-lite
-Stock quant ratings
-Dividend reviews

PRO content includes:
-All premium content
-Top ideas,
-PRO content
-No ads
-VIP Service
-a screen filter,

Is the Seeking Alpha cost worth it with what’s free?
The disappointing truth is Seeking Alpha used to be free. Because it started as a crowdsourced platform for all things investing, free attracted more users, and free provided more value as more individuals shared.

Much to visitors’ dismay, in January 2021, the company changed its paywall. It now has an article limit that resets every 28 days. When logged in, readers can access five articles per month. While no longer entirely free, Seeking Alpha boasts it still has 20 million visitors each month.

Free (Basic) Subscribers do receive basic stock analysis email alerts, news updates, newsletters, and access to stock prices and charts. They also receive Wall Street ratings for each stock and limited access to in-depth analysis and news.

Today the only two free areas of the website that remain. They include market news and educational tools.

The educational tools of Seeking Alpha educate the most inexperienced trader, or anyone interested in the finance industry. Information is well organized, easily understood and thorough. It is organized into categories of interest so readers aren’t bombarded with information. The general categories range from ETFs to cryptocurrency. The articles were written by experts, and are current.

For visitors to the website trying to save a dime, the premium content tabs do allow title and article summaries at no cost. Quickly, however, the content is greyed out when it tries to get users to log in. Seeking Alpa lists a variety of headlines readers may be interested in with the ticker symbol, category, date, and time posted, as well as the number of comments. It provides a good overview of content if an investor wants to dig deeper into the analysis.

The other premium-feature categories Seeking Alpha covers include my portfolio, my authors, top stocks, markets, stock ideas, dividends, and ETFs.

Social Media Seeking Alpha reviews
Twitter was a common platform for articles posted by Seeking Alpha. A few tweets mentioned Seeking Alpha, but over on the social media platform Reddit, the chatter was good overall.

Commenters appreciated the free article titles and summaries. Some appeared to value it so much that they bragged about screenshotting the summaries. Jokingly they didn’t want their comments to attract attention and have that feature removed.

Several commenters were upset with the recent paywall feature and other than screenshots, one user split the cost with a friend to skirt the cost.

Social media also reflected the opinion that the marketplace for paid investment news services has become crowded. And rightly so. One could spend a small fortune and eat up far more money than is being made in trades and dividends.

Political leanings were characterized as being “bullish,” and overall people thought conservative and liberal opinions were published.

Value of information
Seeking Alpha has an archive of more than one million articles. It famously contained analyst opinions Amazon would go bankrupt, and as recently as last year, made predictions that did not come true in this contracting economic state.

Analyst contributions come from both conservative and liberal leanings perhaps demonstrate the value of this crowdsourced platform. A variety of opinions, some strong, some moderate, and some of minority opinion.

Those are the kinds of tips subscribers to multiple services will find of value. The reporting on lesser-known stocks that get overlooked by the big corporate earning calls.

One such example recently came from Twitter, as a capital group mentioned an underperforming stock written about on the Seeking Alpha platform.

Seeking Alpha contributes to major news networks including MSN Money, CNBC, MarketWatch, NASDAQ and TheStreet. Yahoo! Finance ended its contract with Seeking Alpha in 2014.

Customer Comments
Seeking Alpha’s homepage provides customers with an opportunity to ask questions and receive help on the website itself.

Customer comments ranged from not being able to access premium content as well as tech support questions. User feedback was very positive about the app adding a dark mode, and Seeking Alpha hinted at a dark mode for desktops.

Conclusion
Is Seeking Alpha cost worth it ?

There are two ways to analyze this question, one subjectively, the other objectively. Objectively, customers should consider the cost, the size of their portfolio, and the breadth of their portfolio. Objectively users can consider the cost/benefit and the ratio between the two quite quantitatively. The price seems really fair for an audience that is presumably already interested in investing and spends time reading and researching independently. A broad portflio will more likely be covered by Seeking Alpha because it is known for reporting on lesser-known stocks and services.

Subjectively, if a subscriber is a hobbyist investor, and just getting into the nuts and bolts of trading, Seeking Alpha is a great platform to learn from. The educational topics are free, and a broad history of investing will be readily available with a subscription. The website is easy to use, can clearly niche topics, and users can bookmark authors and topics quite quickly

If considering a subscription, weigh the time required on the platform and how much enjoyment and value it will provide. Seeking Alpha provides a vast community of users who have a similar goal, and subscribers should feel confident they can get what they pay for.

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