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What Readers Say About Seeking Alpha

by: David Jackson March 15, 2007    
David Jackson

David Jackson

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For those who want to understand Seeking Alpha better, I thought I'd share an overview of our inbox. We sincerely appreciate readers' feedback on SA and see it as vital to producing a better product. The emails we receive tend to fall into four categories:

  1. Questions and issues about email subscriptions. We send out over 300,000 emails per day, so we get a lot of questions from subscribers, for example about losing emails in their spam filters. (We've now put up an FAQ about email subscriptions to help with this.)
  2. Questions and concerns from companies. Companies track the coverage they get on Seeking Alpha. Sometimes they email us with helpful corrections to conference call transcripts or clarification of factual points. We care passionately about the quality and accuracy of articles on Seeking Alpha, so we reply to every email individually and immediately address any concerns.
  3. Questions about authors and how to contribute. New readers are often surprised at the type of articles on Seeking Alpha -- they're used to news more than opinion and analysis. So we field lots of questions about our contributors, how they're selected, and our compliance standards. Fund managers and industry experts email us to ask about becoming contributors.
  4. The nice stuff. Finally, we receive a ton of email about Seeking Alpha generally, providing feedback on the work of our contributors (now over 400 of them) and editors. Most of it is nice. I personally also get a lot of email about the ETF Investment Guide.

Here are excerpts from emails (names and dates removed) that provide a flavor of what we receive:

Wow! I did not realize that some companies provide a transcript of the call. This is what I discovered. Since I am hard of hearing, I do not always follow the conversation well (comprehension problem more so than volume). I do hope this transcription trend continues along with more captioning of web casts. I am sure http://www.hearingloss.org would be happy to point out your services to those with hearing loss. I am an investor with holdings both individually and thru managed accounts.
Best wishes,
RN in Dallas

Thank you very much for changing my mail and for letting me be a part of your service, I highly recommend your news letters to all my associates at Charles Schwab, and they have sent me e-mails thanking me for letting them know about your service there all very impressed with your news letters. keep up the good work, thanks again
- R.B

Just wanted to let you know that I've found your collections of obsevations etc to be extremely helpful. Thanks.
- R.M

Hi, I love your website and use it intensively for my business purpose (I do some tech research for institutional investors). It's a good time to thank you for the great work you guys are doing: very user friendly site, totally intuitive with good insight and key understanding: transcripts are a very valuable and efficient media to follow a whole sector.
- G.L.

Seeking Alpha is by far my favorite site. It keeps me educated, it helps me make great investment decisions, it's FANTASTIC, thank you very much.
- B.H.

I find SeekingAlpha to be a valuable source of market information and check the site daily. One issue that I have is that I would like to have the ability to preview comments before I post them. Also, if there were a few function buttions in the comment section like a hyperlink button so that one could insert a hyperlink without having to type out the HTML, that would be great.

Otherwise, Seeking Alpha is a great site. Keep up the good work!
- SP

hey thanks for the help. i love your site and the great content. keep up the good work
- J

i have to say that Seeking Alpha's quite different from other like-genre sites in that you bother to reply [to an email query].
am v happy to learn about markets from your site.
all the v best to you and your team!
- PY

Great to see the Seeking Alpha network developing strongly -- keep up the fantastic work.
- T [asset manager]

Staff @ SA,
I would like to congratulate you on crafting a site in which I have derived an incredibly amount of knowledge and utility from. In a sea of blogs pretending they know what they're talking about in regards to finance and technology, you stand out among the rest as a beacon of wisdom in an infinity of monotony. Keep up the good work, and best of luck in the future. You've gained a die hard fan.
-A [money manager]

Please know, of all the information I read on the market, your insight is always THE BEST.

I am new to the intimidating and sometimes very nauseating world of investing, but one of the first things I happened to have stumbled upon was your service. I firmly believe that you have saved me *huge* amounts of newcomer's angst. Not to mention money. Of the gazillion spams I get a day, not ONE SINGLE solicitation for money directly from Seeking Alpha! In other words, after subscribing to you, I am free to delete away and not waste time with the myriad of "helpful" offers I get by the dozens every day.

Admittedly, I don't know what half of your writers are talking about, but hell, I know what the other half are saying - and 2 months ago I didn't even know that. I am learning, and your entire staff is to be commended and thanked for it. Thanks again.

Kudos to whoever edits and annotates the Wall Street Breakfast emailing every day - he/she is doing an absolutely fabulous job. I am honestly not going to be surprised if SeekingAlpha soon becomes the most preferred online financial media out there.

Congrats and sincerely wishing you continued success - I am very impressed.

Keep up the great thought aggregation, far more efficient than traditional wall street.

Not to mention your incredible thoughts about ETFs versus traditional fund management. We are headed toward a tremendous worker shortage (as the baby boomers retire) and so the more fat/inefficiencies people are made aware of, the better the world is.

While I have never met David, I truly respect the work he and the folks at seeking alpha are doing to better the finance profession...

J

I just read through your stuff about using ETFs to implement an asset allocation strategy. I really enjoyed it and got some good stuff out of it. I read a lot about investing and finance so I consider that an accomplishment.

Thank you.
http://etf.seekingalpha.com/article/15298

Sincerely, T

Hello -
I have been happily receiving e-mails daily from you for Cramer's Picks, but suddenly they have stopped.
Whoa! I miss them.
The last one was I received was on Feb. 14, 2007.
What happened, friends?

W

I have a great deal of respect for your site, as do my colleagues. It is a superior resource.

Best,
D

I have to say that your site is one of the best free sites for finding undiscovered stocks.
For instance...did well in SILC TATTF and FTGX....all because of your site..
P

Just a suggestion for your excellent site. I recommend it to all my friends.
D

Hello Seeking Alpha,

I’m a big fan of your site - great job.

Any plans to start covering the London Stock Exchange too? Would be much appreciated.
R

Could you please (re)subscribe me for your daily e-mail (digest mode)? I find your service particularly interesting and useful. Seeking Alpha is the most comprehensive investment news service that I have ever seen and I congratulate you for your successful effort.

J.

Hello,

Could you please provide me with Mr. Shlomo Greenberg's contact information? An e-mail address would be fine.

I read his article/analysis about Teva Pharmaceuticals and I'd like to ask him a question. The company is not doing well and there is an uncertainty about what is going on with it. I own it's stock and Mr. Greenberg's analysis was very helpful in understanding the current situation. I simply wanted him to give few more details since I do worry about the future of the company.

Best regards,
M

My name is E..., and daily I receive emails of information. I look forward to them everyday. Today, I haven't received any emails at all. According to my account, I am set up just fine to receive emails. Is there a problem I don't know about?

Please let me know about what's going on.
Thank you!
E

For some reason your article on Pfizer popped up on my computer. I found it very interesting, especially since I am an individual investor that owns Pfizer. I am not a big investor--middle American type. But I am interested in "Who you are?" "What are your qualifications to dispense financial advice?" and any other background information you can provide. You have my interest.
Thank you.
W

Continue to be impressed with what you've done with SeekingAlpha. It's a resource I use frequently and increasingly, and recommend to others.

I have one suggestion -- printable formats. I'm guessing the technology isn't too advanced and you could get associated sponsorships. I know that you have a "Print this article" function, but it doesn't reformat the page.

Thanks, and keep up the good work...
S

Hello,
I have not received any e-mails all week, should I be concerned?
-A

Hello, I have been getting your emails for about a week, and have found your service to be extremely informative. I have received some info from you that was very relevant to my investment decisions and to my view on the economy. Nice job.

L

Yours is some of the clearest, concise, unbiased financial writing I've seen in a very long time. It ranks up there with another favorite "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Taleb.

Thank you for such great work. I'll recommend it to my serious investor friends.

Thanks for an excellent read!
D

Hi,

My name is T... and I am a senior at ... College. I recently started an investment organization here on campus called...., which is dedicated to teaching women about investing.

I was wondering if I could replicate and redistribute a copy of Geoff Gannon's American Eagle Outfitters Case Study for members of our class (there are roughly 70 women participating, all are undergrads at ...). I would attach any appropriate copyrights that are necessary.

Sincerely,
T

Hey!

Thanks for a great website. You are my go-to-site for info now.
Can you please tell me where I can get prices for natural gas?
Not stock prices of companies that produce it--just the prices of natural gas.

Thanks!
B

WHO OWNS SEEKING ALPHA?
W

hi -- I am a new signupee to Seeking Alpha and am loving the e-mails -- great stuff, very informative and easy to use. I am especially enjoying Phil Davis's column.
E

I think your website and its info is tremendous!!!!!! absolutely amazing. Its really the only financial site i need to look at and I just found it...WOW. Im very happy with it.

thanks,
m

After spending a few minutes at your website, it is clear that you know what investors want and what they need. I really like the Wall Street Journal summary, the transcripts, and the Jim Cramer picks.

Thank you for a great web site that I will continue to use.

Note: The TheStreet.com article lead me to you. Thanks again,

Sincerely,

K

I find your site very informative but I also find it VERY difficult to work around to posting a comment.

regards,
W

I’m the bureau chief here in San Francisco, where we house four reporters covering tech companies (stocks).

The WSJ summary has been a great help for this bleary-eyed editor to sound reasonably knowledgeable in time for our 7 a.m. editorial meeting with New York.
J

Good day,

I’m contacting you from the Gordon Institute of Business Science in Johannesburg, South Africa. (www.gibs.co.za).

We would like to use the following article in a class discussion for our MBA course.

I have been a large fan of your radical guide to investing [now the ETF Investment Guide] and have converted all of my retirement to using just a few ETF which are asset allocated.

I saw the TW earnings transcript and wonder if you're planning to post the transcript from the AOL call this morning? I listened to both calls but I like to link to the transcripts when possible.

Thanks,
S

I've been working with your site for awhile now and am in awe! David Jackson is going to be recognized as a truly great man someday. I would like to know more about you all. Where is the physical presence of Seeking Alpha-is there a headquarters city, or are you decentralized with contributors and departments scattered around the country-world?

Have there been any articles written on Seeking Alpha by mainstream publications like the WSJ or FT that might be archived so I could read up on the site, Mr. Jackson, your history, and so forth?

I have a couple of ideas for helping the site out in appreciation for you're being you as a Hallmark Card might say, but first I want to do some due diligence.

Thanks.
R

I started reading your on-line book yesterday. I really like it, but it still left me with a lot of questions...
M

Love ETF Investor, read it everyday. What happened to Dave Fry's submissions? I really enjoyed his commentary and his sense of humor.

Thanks,

T

Just wanted to pass along a note to say thanks for the value “A Better Way to Invest” [now the ETF Investment Guide] brought to me as an investor looking to improve my game. I wish you great success in this next endeavor.

Regards,
D

...was with a contact a few weeks ago who was telling me about this great new website he was using for market data ... seeking alpha. you must hear stories like this often.

-s

All the kind emails and suggestions really made us smile! (I need to update that severe looking photo at the top of this page so you can see that.) So on behalf of Seeking Alpha's many contributors and much smaller team of editors, thank you to everyone who emailed us with feedback. And for those who haven't, please feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments below.

David

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This article has 19 comments.

  •  
    Mar 15 10:56 AM
    Thank you for running such a valuable site, and for letting us hoi polloi comment at the end of the articles. Whether I agree with the analysts or not, I enjoy reading such a breadth of perspectives. I actually had no idea you guys did subscription, I do all the work of going to the web to fetch it each day!
  •  
    Mar 15 02:14 PM
    The site is great but to you guys should work on original content. I think (from my outside view), that the initial blog aggregation worked in generating a captive audience but to keep making this site more valuable you need to have some original content because you'll probably run out of high quality blogs to eventually bring in. I see this as being sort of at the cusp where you're getting more contributors but the types of articles are so broad in some cases that it's a lot of "noise" relative to just 6 months ago (maybe just my opinion and not borne by facts). The orig content may not be practical based on your staffing level and because the viewership is fairly diverse but you could do a survey to see what article types (market commentary, economic commentary, port mgmt, individual ideas) visitors want the most and then push any original content in that vein.
  •  
    Mar 16 06:52 AM
    Thanks for the suggestions! The original content we currently provide is: (1) news summaries, including Wall Street Breakfast, (2) key excerpts from new IPO filings, (3) summaries of Jim Cramer's stock picks, (4) the Housing Bubble and Real Estate Market Tracker (in our housing section), (5) a weekly Barron's summary, and (6) a ton of conference call transcripts. We don't want to compete with our contributors by providing our own opinion and analysis of stocks.

    What other products would you most like us to rollout?
  •  
    Mar 15 06:05 PM
    Agree with your assessment on your photo. Smile, baby, show us some teeth. Life is good!
  •  
    Mar 29 06:20 AM
    AS PRESIDENT OF A LOCAL BUSINESS CLUB, I WISH TO THANK SEEKING-ALPHA, THE STAFF,AND EDITORS FOR PROVIDING CRISP AND PRESCISE DATA TO US NOVICE INVESTORS.MAYBE YOU CAN CLARIFY ONE IMPORTANT SEGMENT OF EVALUATING A STOCK BEFORE INVESTING IN IT. CASE IN POINT"NSTK". NASTECH PHARMACEUTICAL.
    ALL RATINGS CURRENTLY AND ALL FUNDAMENTALS TO MAKE IT BRIEF, POINT TO DON'T BUY/SELL/AND AVOID.
    YET, CRAMMER RECENTLY SUGGESTED A BUY AND PARK YOUR MONEY RECOMMENDATION. ISN'T THIS SUGGESTION AGAINST ALL PRINCIPLES OF
    SEEKING-ALPHA COMPREHENSIVE EVALUATION METHODS BEFORE PURCHASING A STOCK?
    JTURANO NEW YORK
  •  
    Apr 03 04:54 PM
    jturano,
    We try to publish a range of views on stocks, and *never* include or exclude articles because we agree or disagree with the view on the stock, only on the quality of the argument. So we'll often publish two articles that reach different conclusions on the same stock. Cramer is smart and is watched by many institutional investors, so we think his stock picks are a valuable resource for us to offer on SA.
  •  
    May 19 06:30 PM
    I submit that your site is losing investor interest because too many of your most frequent posters have little of substance to say. They post simplistic opinions with few rationale on the issues de jour, apparently just to be heard. If this site is an adverising medium for advisors, fine.
  •  
    Jul 01 02:06 AM
    Chamois, thanks for this feedback. We're actually rejecting more submissions now than ever before, so we hope that Seeking Alpha will become more and more useful over time.

    If there are specific authors you think we shouldn't carry, please email contact-editorial [at] seekingalpha.com (replacing the "[at]" with "@").

    Hearing from our readers about what they find useful and what they don't like is the best way input we can get to help us improve the site.
  •  
    May 22 11:12 AM
    I wanted to suggest that you should consider developing a section on investor tools. I would like to hear about the tools different investors think are worthwhile and see others' responses in the comment format. Also, this would seem like a natural targeted advertising opportunity for you.
  •  
    Jul 01 02:07 AM
    Thanks Josh -- that's a helpful suggestion.
  •  
    May 24 01:51 PM
    Everyone's an expert during a bull market, yet many self-proclaimed gurus have made stock picks on the long side that have been laughably wrong. Apparantly being right really isn't that important, otherwise we'd see track records. I guess it's fortunate we can at least review other articles contributed by the same author.
  •  
    Jul 01 02:20 AM
    Investgeek, thanks for the comment. Here's my personal view on this:

    I think there are two types of information which are useful for investors: (1) stock picks from people with great track records, and (2) helpful analysis that enables the investor to better understand a stock.

    The second doesn't necessarily need to come from someone who's a good stock picker. For example, there exists an entire industry of people who provide data and information to hedge funds, none of whom actually pick stocks or make recommendations. Arguably, sell side analysts fit this bucket -- they provide financial models and research to the buy side, but are known to have generally poor stock picking track records.

    My goal in founding Seeking Alpha was to aim higher than the mass market stock market web sites by providing thought-provoking analysis for more sophisticated investors. Those investors generally want to make up their own minds about a stock, rather than blindly accepting someone else's recommendation. And what's important to them is information and opinion about a stock that adds to their understanding.

    By the way, that's why it's so important to us to have multiple viewpoints on stocks. It means that there's no clear recommendation on Seeking Alpha (some people think "buy", some "sell"). But reading the bull case and the bear case on a stock makes you a much more informed investor.

    So I think it's important for readers to view Seeking Alpha as a useful input to their investment process, and definitely not as a site that makes recommendations. It's the discussion and data that are important.

    In fact, I'd actually like to see more data and analysis on Seeking Alpha from industry experts who don't pick stocks.
  •  
    Jun 07 09:47 AM
    Once again J.L. Bane is using Seeking Alpha to peddle his smear against Chrystallex. I ask you again, why does Seeking Alpha allow him a forum by publishing his misinformation? It tarnishes your credibility as a source of legitimate information. Is Seeking Alpha just another bullboard for stock touts?
  •  
    Jul 01 02:03 AM
    Fred, Seeking Alpha's goal is to be a neutral platform for the discussion of stocks and to provide multiple viewpoints on any stock.

    If an article is published with material inaccuracies, we remove it or correct it as soon as possible. The first thing for a reader to do is to leave a comment on the articles stating the innacuracy to set the record straight, and then to contact us. (You'll see a link to "Contact Us" in the footer on every page.)

    We also welcome readers to submit articles of their own if they feel they want to challenge another contributor's opinion.

    Note that at least 10 contributors have written about Chrystallex. See:
    seekingalpha.com/by/sy...
  •  
    Jun 16 09:02 AM
    quick question re: "wall street mayhem" - on their site, under the "about" tab, i found the following:

    "Although at the time of posting the authors attempt to provide accurate information, occasionally misleading or false information could be given."

    false information? what gives?

    thanks.
  •  
    Jul 01 02:01 AM
    Suzy, I think that's a disclaimer to protect him from unintentional errors. Note that we don't allow any contributor to Seeking Alpha knowingly to post incorrect material.
  •  
    Jun 20 10:54 PM
    I just read all the nice things that people say about you. And all this time I thought that I was the only one who realized the true worth of your amazing information! I thought you were my secret. I have recommended you as being the absolute BEST. All the comments about your great service I MULTIPLY BY 1,000,000. Thank you. misterchan
  •  
    Jul 01 02:29 AM
    Thank you misterchan!
  •  
    Aug 16 01:08 PM
    The high rate of Mortgage default problem we see today (the major source of problem for the current stock market pullback) is caused by many mortgage lenders, issuing morgage loans to many borrowers who do not meet the old standards for borrowers and do not have good credit and not have secure source of income to guarantee the payback of th loan. Why nobody ever comment on this fact, including Seeking Alpha articles? There are always people making fast money by practicing unethical business practices, causing small investers to lose their savings in 401(k) or IRA accounts. Why doesn't someone or some government organization prevent this kind of business practices early on?
    Katherine
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