Seeking Alpha

What do you like best?

For me, Seeking Alpha is a platform to review, evaluate and contribute investment ideas to a community of stock market investors. I like that Seeking Alpha categorizes the different opportunities (i.e. what's trending, IPOs, ideas), has an active community of folks willing to discuss the pros/cons of each idea and that there are easy ways to contribute your own perspective (and therefore being part of the broader community).

What do you dislike?

I dislike that the platform doesn't meet me where I am at in the investment journey. When I am considering different investment ideas, it helps to understand the broad context (industry dynamics, competitive factors, etc.), hear high quality debates and then have a clear way to take action. Right now, I find myself clicking around through the site to find ideas. From there, I am not sure if I can trust the folks that are contributing the ideas and even discussing from there. While the openness of the platform is definitely a big pro - the trust factor is still a question mark for me which leads me to hesitate before pulling the trigger on a given investment idea.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The problem is that I don't have time to actively bring investment ideas to the table & quickly evaluate them. Despite any cons, Seeking Alpha does bring ideas to the table and gives me enough information to chew on so that I can make a decision. I have made 5+ investments over the past year through the ideas I found on the platform - I do not believe I would've been led on to these ideas without the product.

The other problem is that it's hard to determine the financial sentiment of a company among retail investors. This is especially useful when we're doing competitive analyses for new products our company is evaluating. Helps us understand what we might be getting into and what types of questions come up among investors.