How Seeking Alpha got its start

David Jackson, the founder of investing news and analysis site SeekingAlpha.com, writes about how it got its start.

Jackson writes, “This is the story: After I was laid off from Morgan Stanley after the tech bubble burst, I wrote a few articles about stocks and investing and sent them to my contact list. One was about Blockbuster — I predicted that Netflix would destroy its business. But while I loved stock picking, I also believed that indexing was better for many (most?) investors, so I wrote a series of articles about low cost index investing using ETFs.

“I sent out the articles by email. One of the recipients contacted me and said he’d missed one of the earlier articles in the series, and would I put them online? I did, and that was the genesis of Seeking Alpha. So from the get-go, Seeking Alpha was about stock picking *and* indexing / asset allocation — challenging investors to think about what would work best for them.

“I renamed the articles ‘The Seeking Alpha ETF Investing Guide’, and they are still on the site. Although they were written years ago, they are still entirely relevant today.”

Read more here.