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Are you looking for expert investment advice but don’t want to fork over a fortune for a financial advisor? You may want to consider an online investment advice and research website. One of the big names in this industry is Seeking Alpha, a unique crowdsourced research content platform targeted toward intermediate and advanced investors.
While Seeking Alpha contains some free content, most of its in-depth articles and investment tools require a paid subscription. Is it worth the membership fee? And what exactly does Seeking Alpha provide investors? We’ll help you decide if Seeking Alpha is a good fit for your needs.
Article Overview
- Rating, Pros & Cons
- Key Features
- Pricing
- User Reviews
- Seeking Alpha vs The Motley Fool
- The Seeking Alpha App (Video)
- What’s Our Final Verdict?
Seeking Alpha
Pros
- Excellent place to conduct company research
- Thousands of in-depth articles
- Good investment tools and features
- 14-day free trial
Cons
- Content may be too technical for beginning investors
- Free content is more limited than competitors
- Some users say the quality of authors is hit or miss
- Some complaints that the site overly moderates comments
Key Features
Like similar investment advice sites (The Motley Fool, Morningstar, etc.), Seeking Alpha offers a wide variety of features, including the latest investing news, analyst reports, real-time market data, investment strategies, top investment picks, and a portfolio manager. But here are the noteworthy features and tools that set Seeking Alpha apart from its competitors.
- Screen for top-rated stocks with a ratings screener
- Get dividend scores and forecasts
- See all Quant Ratings and underlying metrics
- Publishes management conference call transcripts for many companies — these transcripts can give you insight into each company’s prior quarterly performance and management’s outlook for future performance
- Build and manage a portfolio of stocks or ETFs and get alerts on upgrades and downgrades on portfolio
- Long and Short ideas: authors post articles supporting long or short-selling positions in underlying companies
Pricing
Seeking Alpha offers two membership levels. It has a 14-day free trial for its Premium subscription (credit card required).
- Premium: $239.88/year or $29.99/month
- Pro: $2,399.88/year or $299.99/month
- View all subscription options
Customer Reviews
Positive Reviews
Seeking Alpha gets a lot of negativity that it really doesn’t deserve. This site relies on crowdsourced content, so obviously some authors are going to be better and some are going to be awful. You can easily see an author’s track record compared to how the stock is doing and that’s how you can know whether to trust their opinion or not. The author opinions are actually a good resource. You get another method for evaluating stocks. I’ve incorporated this into my decision making process, and haven’t looked back. – Sonny E., Sitejabber 4/7/2020
Seeking Alpha is the market leader in providing informed investment advice to yearning investment audience. The site promotes healthy dialogue between the advisors and the readers and provides valuable data pertaining to multiple investment portfolios. – Wait-For-The-Edge, Trustpilot 8/22/2020
Complaints
Articles are very long yet say very little. Breaking news reports are full of factual errors. Extremely narcissistic authors with limited credentials. Financial data, which is freely available on many reputable sites like Yahoo Finance, are being put under a paywall on Seeking Alpha. Complete waste of money. –Micheal B., Sitejabber 8/13/2020
Seeking alpha has some nuggets of great information in some of their articles. However any serious negative or challenging questions to authors on the site results in your posts being deleted. This service can be an echo chamber unless you are pure vanilla and never have challenged topic to bring. You can learn some information from some authors but the editors suck. – Kenneth K., Sitejabber 12/31/2019
Seeking Alpha vs The Motley Fool
Here are some key comparisons between Seeking Alpha and The Motley Fool, another top investment advice website.
- The Motley Fool has its own experts who give investment advice and stock picks. Seeking Alpha is a crowdsourced platform with articles by independent authors – many have investment management backgrounds, but their expertise and quality of advice vary widely.
- The Motley Fool is better for beginners or those who don’t want to sift through a ton of content. Seeking Alpha is geared toward intermediate and advanced investors, and much of its content is far more technical and in-depth.
- The Motley Fool has excellent online forums where members can share a lot of useful tips and advice. Seeking Alpha allows members to comment on individual articles, but some users complain that Seeking Alpha overly moderates comments, especially when they disagree with an author’s perspective.
Compare The Motley Fool and Seeking Alpha
See The Seeking Alpha App (Video)
Seeking Alpha apps (Android | iOS) are feature-rich and generally get good reviews from users. Here’s a brief video snapshot of their iOS app.
What’s Our Final Verdict?
If you want to dig deep into company research and get detailed advice on specific stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and ETFs, you may find Seeking Alpha a good fit. Many of Seeking Alpha’s authors have investment management backgrounds and give Wall Street perspectives you may not find elsewhere.
However, many Seeking Alpha customers say the authors’ quality varies a great deal so it takes time to find authors you want to follow. We’ve also seen some complaints that the advice you’ll find there is pretty hit or miss regarding portfolio performance.
Not sure if Seeking Alpha is the best fit for your investing goals, your financial situation, or your level of investing expertise? Be sure to check out our reviews of the best stock research sites for some other options. Many serious investors use more than one of these website memberships to help them make the most informed decisions.
