A lot of business reporters are assholes. I’m not sure there are more assholes per capita in business journalism, but, by virtue of the job, they can be pretty high profile. It’s clear that a lot of those folks get their jollies from seeing share prices swing up or down (mostly down).
But I respect those folks. I may disagree with some of their judgment calls (there is clearly a bias toward covering bad news), but nearly everyone in my Rolodex — even the assholes — is making a genuine effort to get things right.
They check names. They want facts to be correct. They want quotes to be accurate. They work to insulate themselves from accusations of bias. They put their name at the top of the story and stand behind the contents. You want to call those guys up and bitch? They’re happy to mix it up.
So I don’t have a big problem with the assholes.
The bigger threat to quality communication about business is sites such as Seeking Alpha, which follow the hip new media model of letting anyone write with no serious effort to make sure they’re writing accurately and without bias. The site is clogged with anonymous posters, many of whom are writing in clear support of their disclosed positions. And that’s the system working well. The disclosure process itself is done on the honor system, which ain’t ideal when dollars are on the line.
That’s not to say that there’s no quality content on the site. It’s just far harder to tell honest analysis from shilling than it is pretty much anywhere else.
It would be easy to lump the Seeking Alphas of the world in with community posts at BuzzFeed or Huffington Post, where cat-related user-generate content sits harmless or unread or harmlessly unread. But Seeking Alpha is getting eyeballs: 8 million pairs a month. And in a world of shrinking staffs on the business page, Seeking Alpha is filling a void, especially with regard to small cap stocks.
Check out the Google Finance page for your favorite thinly traded ticker. Bet you see a Seeking Alpha story.
This makes my life difficult. I don’t have the time to go and chase 7,000 “contributors,” many of them amateurs, playing dress-up and pretending to be analysts/journalists. And my Rolodex don’t have enough business reporters — even the assholes — to drown out the low-quality content with real, thoughtful reporting.
Up in the ivory towers of journalism, there is some concern that the ratio of flacks to journalists is getting way out of whack (it’s more than three to one now, if you’re interested). Companies are hiring lots more people like me, even as the pool of people like you shrinks. But we’re not building some army of pitchmen designed to blanket reporters with phone calls and emails. We’re trying to fill a void. Figure out ways of getting into the content game with tweets, blogs, “sponsored content,” newsletters and stuff like that.
We believe — in our heart of hearts — that investors and readers will be better off hearing from us than parsing the reality presented by some pseudonym-filled, loosely supervised peanut gallery on the web.
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very true article. When i first started trading, i swore by seeking alpha, looked at it as my bible. nothing but losses. it took awhile for me to smarten up, and after eliminating that site, im doing pretty well, and making some money on good trades.
you're doing well because of the QE driven market, my neighboor is a hot shot now with his 120% return in 2013 ..just like he was in 2000 ...it all ends the same :D
Is Frankie Flack a former business reporter? Judging from this piece he sure is an AAAxxxx. Only a flack would think business reporters take too much joy in reporting negative news about companies. What he really means is some of them don't use his releases and op-eds about how wonderful his clients are.
I just want to point out that Seeking Alpha Market Currents is an amazing part of the site. The rest... yeah it sucks. For small cap companies...sounds like you need to start training to be your own analyst.
Response from David Jackson, the founder and CEO of SeekingAlpha.com:
http://www.talkingbiznews.com/2/why-seeking-alpha-is-uncomfortable-for-pr-people/
I agree. I am frequently driven to Seeking Alpha when reading up on Tesla. They trash Tesla in every article, usually with passive aggressive writing styles. When I read anything that site has written about Tesla, it strikes me that the contributors there are seeking to shut the company down. It seems almost as if they are a lobbyist group with a hidden agenda instead of business analysts.
Agree! 100%!
Damn, tell it like it is! Lol, nice for someone just to come out and say the obvious!
Seeking Alpha is a "paid contribution" site. Once they started paying people to contribute articles, it no longer became about people sharing analysis. It became about people cranking out as many articles as they could to cash in as a side hustle / job. There are interesting people writing interesting things, but a lot of it is just "look at this statistic, look at this graph", then they use that to support a debate they have. The problem is that everyone can pull out some statistic or graph to support their argument if they cherry pick / omit things that don't support their argument.
The other issue with it is that once you give an investor a megaphone to shout through, it is a very slippery slope for them to start giving out misleading informaiton in order to try to skew the market the way they want it. It basically turns into a magic act of misdirection. They want to cash in on shorting something, so they say what they need to to make that happen. They want to get folks to pump-n-dump some stock.. they will say what is needed to make a small run on it. It's all sleight of hand except instead of bumping into someone and going "oops, sorry" while picking their pocket, they are posting articles that go "look over there!" to distract folks while they mastermind their real plans.
If anyone had any real knowledge about what the companies were doing that folks regularly cover on seeking alpha that could help them make a buck, they wouldn't go blabbing it to the world. Most investment news is either hindsight 20/20 (to which it's too late) or future speculation, to which everyone already does that.
The only real benefit from sites like seeking alpha provide is there are a few good contributors on there that do a lot of leg work to gather a lot of stats and run a lot of accounting / finance equations to get some base determination numbers.
What they SAY about all of that can be disregarded, b/c what they SAY may be what they want you to HEAR in order to get what THEY want (which means money away from you and to them).
But, when you get folks paid for something, then the business model shifts.
Seeking Alpha is about people cranking out articles as a business model now.
It's like informercial junk.. guys on late night tv try to sell you books that will divulge the secret of the real estate game or whatever. These guys don't have any inside knowledge. If they did, they'd keep their yaps shut and cash in. All they have is some books that they're selling, and THAT'S how they're making money; not by working real estate, but by suckering idiots into buying their books.
Seeking Alpha is the same thing now. Just a bunch of folks trying to "sell their books" to idiots that will buy them. It's just the Seeking Alpha site itself is a middleman that cashes in on both the contributors and the subscribers. The folks making money at Seeking Alpha are the site owner (bulk of money), the contributors (peanuts for selling "books") and that's it.
Folks making real money off the stock market are not going to spend hours writing fluff pieces for a web site very day to make a few extra bucks.
I use to love Seeking Alpha but it is unreadable now. It is filled with hacks who are cheerleaders for the stock market swelling to new heights, regardless of reality, right wing dogma and Trump. They have very little room for contradictory data of any kind. I rarely go there anymore.