Seeking Alpha Personal Finance Review

Services and Account Features

Seeking Alpha is the reader’s stock tip resource. If you have a boundless curiosity about investing, Seeing Alpha will reward you with copious amounts of original writing that is well-indexed and easy to search, for free. The site makes it easy to access opinions according to your market interests, whether that’s cryptocurrency, REITs, technology stocks, or the healthcare sector. The company also organizes its content into various “ideas” and allows you to learn about particular investment strategies and perhaps trouble-shoot your own. Tired of reading? You can tune into one of Seeking Alpha’s podcast channels, instead. 

With Seeking Alpha’s free account, you can create your own portfolio by adding individual stocks one by one. Adding a stock gives you access to real-time information about it. You can also sign up for email or text alerts when new content on the stocks you’re following is added to Seeking Alpha’s library. With every account level, investors can use the Stock Talk feature of the site which functions like a financial Twitter. 

As you move up to Seeking Alpha’s premium accounts, you gain access to their more exclusive intelligence, again in the form of news and opinions. However, you also have the ability to research all of their proprietary “quant” stock ratings. (The company’s free option offers limited access to those.) Quant ratings form the basis of the quantitative investment strategy favored by some investors. Quantitative investment strategies take the emotion and intuition out of investing. While traditional ratings provide a current snap shot of a stock, quant ratings are also predictive. Seeking Alpha’s quant ratings documents also delve into many factors that influence ratings. 

Unlike some stock tip apps, Seeking Alpha doesn’t allow you to automatically integrate your brokerage accounts into your Seeking Alpha portfolio. If you’re looking for efficiency and the ability to track all of your investments simultaneously in one convenient place, Seeking Alpha may not represent a great solution for you. But if you’re an information junkie and you’re looking for guidance from some of the top minds on the Street, you may find a comfortable home with Seeking Alpha.

Fees

Seeking Alpha offers two levels of paid membership. Their Premium service costs $19.99 per month. It gives you unlimited access to more than a million articles. You can also listen to recordings of earnings and conference calls, track the performance of the many investment “ideas” presented by Seeking Alpha authors, research view ratings on the authors themselves, read dividend and earnings forecasts, and more. Their Pro service, which costs $199 per month includes everything the Premium service offers plus access to the company’s “top ideas,” the services of an Editorial Concierge, and the opportunity to create customized research screeners. It is the only plan level that allows you to use Seeking Alpha without seeing any advertisements.

Customer Experience

Seeking Alpha is a powered by a large community of investment experts. The company enhances its value through the crowd sourcing of financial intelligence and encourages subscribers to become site contributors.  To our way of thinking, Seeking Alpha is custom-made for a “deep thinker” class of investors. If you’re seeking exposure to a wide variety of expert opinions to help inform your investment decision making, we expect you will love using Seeking Alpha. If you’re the type of person who likes to follow your favorite columnists, political pundits, and authors, Seeking Alpha can provide that experience in the financial realm.

You can access the wealth of knowledge amassed by Seeking Alpha using your computer, tablet, or smartphone. Seeking Alpha’s website is easy to search and navigate, even for beginning investors.

Reputation and Accreditation

Seeking Alpha receives 3 out of 5 stars on Trustpilot and a D+ rating from the BBB, but these ratings are based on fewer than a handful of actual reviews. Many of the companies we’ve reviewed are not rated at all by these organizations. It’s important to note that the BBB penalizes companies for not responding to complaints posted on its site. Seeking Alpha may not even be aware that these few complaints are out there. Perhaps the better way to evaluate the company’s reputation is by consulting the credentials and ratings of the site’s numerous contributors, which Seeking Alpha makes available to users. Users should also be aware that contributors may be using the site to feather their own nests. “Pumping” is the industry term for that kind of activity. So we advise you to do some research into the research and make your own judgments on the objectivity of various sources.