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After Seeking Alpha moved articles from third party authors behind a paywall without their consent, we agreed to sever ties. I then asserted my right to be forgotten under the CCPA & GDPR (I was a resident on both continents), asking management to remove all content that I had posted. They agreed, and then instead of doing so, removed the index to all my articles, and unilaterally changed the name on the account to "Income Clock" without further communication, let alone consent. SA is technologically incompetent as well, so the articles below can still be read on their site without an account if you know what to do. It's much better to just ask me (esekla AT this domain) for a summary and update, though. Read on below for why both ethical analysts and readers should have major reservations about the site. Without further ado, here is the index of my articles on Seeking Alpha:
Even before parting ways, I had persistent problems with SA, which can be summed up in 2 main points:
- Explicitly unequal treatment.
- Self-serving bias.
On point #1, SA had stated willingness to
vet Top Idea articles, but explicitly refused to do so for me,
probably because I'd been openly critical of the platform. The
payment for other articles was generally not worth my time, and
without vetting, SA's system puts all the risk on the
Contributor. It simply doesn't make sense to put days or weeks of
work into an article with no clear indication on how editors who
are generally ignorant about a stock's specifics will react.
Thus, submitting high-quality articles was akin to having one's
post-doc work reviewed by grade school teachers, and getting them
published often mangled the message.
Which leads me to point #2. Whether due to lack of stock-specific knowledge or direction to publish what sells to the Wall St. types that benefit from misinformation and can spend their employer's money to promote that, SA Pro Editors tended to select articles based on format, rather than insight. I observed this leading to selection and promotion of articles that look professional, but turn out to be dead wrong. In this way, the business model seems similar to a casino's, where the occasional win (a comprehensively correct article that points out where mainstream analysis has gone wrong) is the best means to draw people into what is, overall, a losing proposition. I cite the discontinuation of performance contests, and the terrible overall returns on their pre-selected award winning articles as evidence. For other, less compensated articles, I saw SA rewarding volume and failing to screen for quality, thereby hurting most individual investors by wasting their time in favor of maximizing its own revenue.
Of course, it wasn't always like that. Much like The Motley Fool before it, SA used to have many high-quality authors, back when it was making a name for itself. Not the ones who published a ton of articles, but rather the ones who were too busy making a profit to publish any more than the occasional gem. J. Mintzmeyer, who remains one of the top authors in the Marketplace that I pitched to SA, at one point actually paid for counter-arguments to his thesis on Golar, a company which I also cover. As a result, I contributed to that effort without even bothering to engage with Editors on the site, despite the opportunity for extra income. SA needs to be at least as good as J. if it wants its articles to be helpful rather than harmful to its readership on balance.
Eli, the former Chief Editor and then CEO that I made my pitch to, had told me in personal conversation that he expects the best Contributors to be more knowledgeable on individual stocks than the Editors. However, SA's editorial system does NOTHING to acknowledge this and discussion and work for both general articles and the Marketplace revolves entirely around marketing rather than performance. The most important part of successful investing is realizing what you don't know, but SA consistently rewards cheerleaders while ignoring and even censoring criticism. Without changing that, the site will continue to function mostly as a message board that Wall St. denizens use for their own ends. Venture Capitalists and Sell-Side analysts aren't going to help. I've worked with both of them, and my observation is that the former profit from shutting the majority of the public out of the best opportunities. The latter do so by publishing what often amounts to misinformation benefiting funds they are not really separated from. SA management would need to resist this influence and look past its own platform and P&L in order to actually help its readers, and possibly even change an industry that has become toxic to society.
Which leads me to point #2. Whether due to lack of stock-specific knowledge or direction to publish what sells to the Wall St. types that benefit from misinformation and can spend their employer's money to promote that, SA Pro Editors tended to select articles based on format, rather than insight. I observed this leading to selection and promotion of articles that look professional, but turn out to be dead wrong. In this way, the business model seems similar to a casino's, where the occasional win (a comprehensively correct article that points out where mainstream analysis has gone wrong) is the best means to draw people into what is, overall, a losing proposition. I cite the discontinuation of performance contests, and the terrible overall returns on their pre-selected award winning articles as evidence. For other, less compensated articles, I saw SA rewarding volume and failing to screen for quality, thereby hurting most individual investors by wasting their time in favor of maximizing its own revenue.
Of course, it wasn't always like that. Much like The Motley Fool before it, SA used to have many high-quality authors, back when it was making a name for itself. Not the ones who published a ton of articles, but rather the ones who were too busy making a profit to publish any more than the occasional gem. J. Mintzmeyer, who remains one of the top authors in the Marketplace that I pitched to SA, at one point actually paid for counter-arguments to his thesis on Golar, a company which I also cover. As a result, I contributed to that effort without even bothering to engage with Editors on the site, despite the opportunity for extra income. SA needs to be at least as good as J. if it wants its articles to be helpful rather than harmful to its readership on balance.
Eli, the former Chief Editor and then CEO that I made my pitch to, had told me in personal conversation that he expects the best Contributors to be more knowledgeable on individual stocks than the Editors. However, SA's editorial system does NOTHING to acknowledge this and discussion and work for both general articles and the Marketplace revolves entirely around marketing rather than performance. The most important part of successful investing is realizing what you don't know, but SA consistently rewards cheerleaders while ignoring and even censoring criticism. Without changing that, the site will continue to function mostly as a message board that Wall St. denizens use for their own ends. Venture Capitalists and Sell-Side analysts aren't going to help. I've worked with both of them, and my observation is that the former profit from shutting the majority of the public out of the best opportunities. The latter do so by publishing what often amounts to misinformation benefiting funds they are not really separated from. SA management would need to resist this influence and look past its own platform and P&L in order to actually help its readers, and possibly even change an industry that has become toxic to society.