Years ago I would look at Seeking Alpha but figured the analyses were a bit amateurish, but over time, I think more and more good stuff has been rising to the top. Still, I was curious what others here thought about these aggregators.
StockTwits too. I’m not a big follower of StockTwits and thought it was just a way to try to work the Twitter craze, but I see some recognizable names post there, so maybe I should look more.
What opine ye?
There are some good write-ups on SeekingAlpha but you have to wade through a lot of sh!t to find them. I don’t use StockTwits – seems to have an even worse signal:noise ratio.
^ Agree. The quality range spans a wide spectrum from complete garbage to pretty good. Many of the people posting are not very good IMO.
Went to StockTwits just now and looked up SPY and saw this:
“$SPY What if all the high frequency algorithms suddenly become self-aware?”
Most tweets were kinda useless, and very questionable content, but that one was funny:
SA has some good stuff but it can be hit or miss. I find it’s good for idea generation but I don’t trust their numbers so I do my own dd.
You realize you can get paid for writing articles right? You get paid pretty decent amount, I think its $10 for a thousand views. So you can maximize your revenue by focusing on well known stocks. Ideally you can just run a screen on famoust stocks and post something just to generate $$. Which is what I presume many already do…
I think Seeking Alpha is great for getting up to speed on the “story” behind a stock. I find it useful and frequent it very regularly.
I highly recommend anyone that is interested in serious investing forums to consider applying to Value Investors Club. I joined in the last year and am pretty impressed with the general quality of discussions there.
I look at SA macro view articles to try to gauge how maninstream or not my macro own macro views are, and to see if I’m missing anything that seems reasonable.
stocktwits is for morons. SA has some good content, you just need to follow the writers that post good content and who post real facts. A lot of misinformation on that site that is unedited, unconfirmed, etc.
I tried following stocktwits for a bit but like mentioned, just way too much noise and nothing useful.
SA’s become the first stop on my research process. Read a variety of recent articles on your company of choice, read the comments, think critically about what’s being said, compare with your own thoughts and check out the company’s investor presentations and things of that nature. I’ve actually seen some decent success based on that process. But I agree, there’s lots of fluff/plain wrong stuff in there too. Just wish the posters would cover canadian company’s too.
I like SeekingAlpha for the transcripts of earnings calls. That’s about all I use it for though.
I’ve posted a few articles this summer on SA (more as a hobby than anything else). And unfortuntately (although SA has changed the payout structure recently to incentivize more insightful articles), there still are a number of authors that can bank on a large following/reputation to spew out some crap for easy bucks.
I saw an article on TSLA from a CFA/CAIA charterholder, thinking there might be something good there, but it was very generic information that anyone could have thrown together. And the worse part is, for whatver reason, it generated hundreds and hundreds of activty in comments (while the author dissapeared in the background), further increasing viewership and income.
I had an article that they paid me $150 for (it was a long/short pair trade idea contrasting the Canadian and American), but they wanted me to focus on a short idea on one company, even though my article was very lacking specific financial data, focusing more on economic, macro data. The problem with the editors reading the article, is that maybe he or she can’t discipher true insight, which is why you’ll see a lot of fluff out there.
Having said that, there are some very good authors, and these guys are clearly doing it as an expression of thought. Going back on my article, the time I spent was far longer than the payout of what they gave me (even thought it was nice), I think only 800 people viewed it, with no comments, haha! I can compile a list of solid authors if anyone is interested.
I am interested. And throw your name in it just for kicks.
^ Homo.
A former coworker of mine is on seeking alpha and has some boss status. However, I stopped reading his bile when I saw, “Rather than cash flow, I use earnings as a basis for valuation and equity recommendation.” Pure sht.
The worst of it is this nigga went to a nonhacksaw school.
^ I thought about taking a hacksaw to myself after reading about your non-hacksaw friend, trying to pass off EPS as a proxy for cash flow…shame on that brotha
I seen seeking alpha and i notice that it is not good anymore and i think it is because you said that their are many now the better than it.