Block Seeking Alpha Authors

[rapidacid]

Like many of you I get email alerts from Seeking Alpha when an article is written about a company I have on file.

Some articles are great, a lot are not too good. Likewise, some authors tend to produce high quality articles weekly and others seem to pump out crap articles daily, or sometimes multiple times a day.

I hope no one on this forum is this Abba's Aces guy, because his stuff is consistently crap and is quite literally a mad libs style template where he simply plugs in metrics with zero deep dive into the company. I'd have to imagine that he's banging out a couple hundred bucks per article, and it's all the same rehashed crap with no insight.

So, with presumably no improved QA process on the horizon at SA, does anyone know how to follow a company, but only if its not written by a specific blacklist of authors?

[Dividend Watcher]

I haven't found a way. What frustrates me is when they don't show the author with the article title on the home page. I often click on an article with an interesting title only to find the article is fluff.

[EricL]

(11-06-2014, 08:29 AM)rapidacid Wrote: Like many of you I get email alerts from Seeking Alpha when an article is written about a company I have on file.

Some articles are great, a lot are not too good. Likewise, some authors tend to produce high quality articles weekly and others seem to pump out crap articles daily, or sometimes multiple times a day.

I hope no one on this forum is this Abba's Aces guy, because his stuff is consistently crap and is quite literally a mad libs style template where he simply plugs in metrics with zero deep dive into the company. I'd have to imagine that he's banging out a couple hundred bucks per article, and it's all the same rehashed crap with no insight.

So, with presumably no improved QA process on the horizon at SA, does anyone know how to follow a company, but only if its not written by a specific blacklist of authors?

I don't know of a way to follow a company by screening specific authors, other than by getting the daily e-mail alerts and clicking on only the articles written by authors you like. Otherwise, it doesn't take much of a quick scan to know if the the article is worth reading, you can usually figure that out in the first paragraph or two. I suppose its a bad aspect of a crowd-sourced site, but the good thing is the content is free so you aren't out anything other than the minute or two it takes to scan the article.

As for the a couple hundred bucks per article comment, the average income per article right now across the entire site is actually $71.50. You would have to pump out a ton of articles to make a living at that rate.

[rapidacid]

4 articles in today's email alone

[earthtodan]

I sent a letter to seeking alpha asking for a way to screen out certain authors from my alerts. They said that feature was not in the pipeline.

Sometimes when I receive alerts on my phone through the app, I actually go to the website where I can see the author and the summary first. If it looks worthless then I just dismiss it.

I've also thought about requesting a button at the bottom of articles that says "this was not worth my time," where the author would not receive the 1¢.

I think a good compromise would be to at least have an option to only receive alerts for news rather than articles. But a better goal would probably be for me to get to a comfort level with my core holdings where I can turn off the daily seeking alpha distractions altogether and focus more on other aspects of my life, like my job.

[alexg]

I just like how he goes from Fundamentals to Technicals

[rapidacid]

I stumbled onto this interesting SA page today : http://seekingalpha.com/leader-board/opinion-leaders

[Kerim]

(11-06-2014, 10:59 AM)earthtodan Wrote: I've also thought about requesting a button at the bottom of articles that says "this was not worth my time," where the author would not receive the 1¢.

That's a great idea!

I've often thought that would be a great feature on SA, to block authors you don't want to waste time on. But it does not make any sense from SA's perspective, I guess. Allowing users to block authors would only mean fewer clicks.