Seeking Alpha is a stock market blog that provides free stock market analysis primarily from money managers, investment newsletter writers, and the general public. Alpha is a financial term referring to a stock's performance, relative to the market indexes used by fund managers. So, fund managers "seek alpha".
Seeking Alpha focuses on opinion and analysis rather than news. Although it has its own editorial staff, it is primarily written by investors who describe their personal approach to stock picking and portfolio management, rather than by journalists. Its readership includes money managers, research analysts, investment bankers, and individual investors.[1]
Seeking Alpha was started in 2004 by David Jackson,[2] who was ranked #2 on U.S. News & World Report's list of global 'Market Movers' gaining the most influence in 2009.[3] Seeking Alpha has 80 employees on three continents and has partnerships with Yahoo! Finance,[4] Dow Jones MarketWatch, E-Trade,[5] and CNET.[6] The company is backed by Benchmark Capital, a firm that funded eBay.[7]
Seeking Alpha offers summaries of Jim Cramer's comments. The company has also developed a widget that features stock quotes from the NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX, Pink Sheets, and OTC Bulletin Boards.[8]
Seeking Alpha is the largest stock market blog, with over 4000 unpaid contributors, at a rate of about 250 articles per day.[9] Its material is also available via BlackBerry and RSS feed.[10] Also in 2007, Seeking Alpha was the recipient of Forbes' Best of the Web Award [11] and Kiplinger's Award for Most Informative Website.[12] It was also recommended on Fox News by Liz MacDonald as a top financial blog the same year.[13] According to Google Analytics, Seeking Alpha currently has 6.5 million unique monthly readers and 65 million monthly pageviews. Seeking Alpha has a large distribution network including Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, Etrade, Nasdaq, Bing, MSN, CNet and others.[14] Seeking Alpha claims that combined with this distribution network, its contributors' articles have a total reach of over 50 million unique monthly readers. In January 2010, Seeking Alpha launched a premium program which promises to pay its contributors for exclusive content.[15]
According to Nielsen Analytics, Seeking Alpha has the leading audience of any financial website including Bloomberg, CNN Money, and The Wall Street Journal. Nielsen reported that Seeking Alpha has the highest percentage of C-level executives (17.6%), as well as the most educated (77.2% with graduate or post graduate degrees), the wealthiest (exact percentage undisclosed) and the most active investors (52%). [16]