Seek Alpha: Don’t Be A Fool

Quantitative investing is changing the way investors buy and sell stocks. Artificial intelligence is bringing the simplicity of financial data in a way that allows investors to remove emotion from investing. Whether a novice or an experienced investor, you get your investment research and stock picks from many places – Seeking Alpha, services like Motley Fool, Zacks, Morningstar, friends, and family. But, not all services are created equal, as evidenced by Seeking Alpha’s best-in-class top 10 stocks’ outperformance.

Seeking Alpha vs. Motley Fool: Performance

Simply put, 2022 was one of the worst years for stocks since the Great Financial Crisis, and Seeking Alpha delivered alpha in a down market. Although past performance does not guarantee future results, SA’s Top 10 Stocks for 2022 and Top 10 Stocks for 2023 outperformed the stocks in Motley Fool’s articles 10 Stocks That Could Double Your Money In 2022 and 10 Top Stocks That Can Make You Richer In 2023¹. As evidenced in the tables below, SA’s Top 10 Stocks for both years outperformed the Top 10 stock recommendations from Zacks, Yahoo Finance, and Morningstar.

Seeking Alpha Quant Ratings Top 10 Stocks total returns crush competitors’ performance.²

No one wants to lose money. Investors want to be confident in their investing decisions, regardless of market volatility, rising costs, interest rates, and economic uncertainty. Protecting your portfolio from bad stock picks before buying can be the difference between winning and losing. Using a data-driven approach to highlight the weaknesses and strengths of a stock’s financial metrics, our investment tools can instantly score and break down your stock’s metrics, instantly characterizing how your stocks compare to the sector median. Whether an experienced or new investor, Seeking Alpha offers something for everyone. The difference between these rival products is performance; Seeking Alpha Quant Ratings System is crushing Motley Fool!

What do you get with Seeking Alpha and Motley Fool?

Seeking Alpha and Motley Fool offer Premium access to research, articles, videos, and education focused on the financial markets if you’re more research-driven. While both platforms offer unique features, SA’s offerings are more robust, highlighted by in-depth analysis, breaking news, and crowdsourced content from thousands of independent and Wall Street analysts.

Seeking Alpha’s tools perform much of the leg work for investors on individual stocks, REITs, ETFs, and other asset classes and investments. The table above compares each company’s premium subscriptions.

1. Target Audience

Seeking Alpha caters to all audiences, using objective quantitative data. While Motley Fool boasts an easy-to-use platform that caters more explicitly to beginning investors, Seeking Alpha offers products that speak to everyone while offering robust, in-depth analysis for intermediate and research-driven investors who desire greater transparency.

2. Stock Picks

Both services offer lists of top-rated stocks. Motley Fool’s Stock Advisor finds high-growth stocks with upside potential, typically popular names like Amazon, Tesla, and Netflix. We believe a core reason for our Quant Ratings System portfolio’s outperformance is that it does not focus on one specific investing style, such as ‘Growth.’ We look for the most attractive opportunities in the market by identifying stocks that are collectively strong on a combination of value, growth, profitability, momentum, and revised forward-looking earnings estimates. This unique, systematic approach is the foundation of Seeking Alpha’s Quant Ratings System portfolio.

3. Analysis, Content, and Investment Community

Both platforms offer breaking news, stock market news, and educational content to inform investors about investing ideas. Each platform fosters a community of contributors, analysts, and readers who can offer insights, analyze, and interact with one another through online discussions about why some stocks have strong and poor ratings. Seeking Alpha Premium offers an edge, giving access to resources for commodities, cryptocurrencies, and companies’ financial statements for up to 10 years. SA is appropriate for new investors, but it also caters to more experienced investors, delivering content and a community that shares more technical information.

4. Stock Ratings and Screeners

Both services offer ratings based on a stock’s subjective and objective assessment. Seeking Alpha offers unique extra features for each stock, including access to its proprietary Quant Ratings & Factor Grades. This feature helps investors filter fundamentally strong stocks from weaker ones.

5. Quant Ratings and Factor Grades

A unique part of Seeking Alpha not offered by Motley Fool is its Quant Ratings and Factor Grades, which rate investment characteristics on a sector-relative basis. The grades help investors quickly interpret the strength of the data point. Similar to a school report card, grades from ‘A+’ to ‘F’ are assigned based on strong versus weak underlying metrics based on five factors:

1. Valuation
2. Growth
3. Profitability
4. Momentum
5. EPS Revisions

Investors can instantly identify the strength or weakness of each stock’s metric compared to the sector based on the Factor Grades, a powerful tool for making smart investment decisions.

Strong Factor Grades vs. Weak Factor Grades

Strong Factor Grades are highlighted in green and indicate excellent potential and fundamentally sound characteristics compared to the sector; collectively, these may be rated Buy and Strong Buy stocks. Poor factor grades with less-than-optimal metrics are highlighted in red and collectively may indicate stocks rated Sell and Strong Sell. Seeking Alpha’s Quant Ratings and Factor Grades allow you to check any stock pick before you buy, pointing out warnings against stocks that could tank.

What is Quant Investing?

Quantitative investing is an investment approach that relies on mathematical models, algorithms, and data analysis to make decisions about buying and selling securities. There are many benefits to quantitative investing. Seeking Alpha’s quantitative model largely picks stocks based on a data-driven process that compares a stock’s financial metrics to the same metric median for the sector, removing fear and emotion. Seeking Alpha’s Quant Rating System strategy uses an algorithm incorporating the five popular investment characteristics of valuation, growth, profitability, momentum, and EPS revisions. The benefits of quant include:

1. Updated daily – Quant provides a fresh opinion of each stock daily. Unlike investment analysts’ research reports that can become dated quickly, the quantitative approach is to update all the data, Factor Grades, and directional recommendations daily.
2. Consistency and reliability – Quantitative investing is systematic, and taking emotion out of investing helps eliminate the psychological factors leading to poor investment decisions. When fear and greed move the markets, quant investing helps to identify mispriced securities.
3. Time effective – Algorithms produce output quickly. This requires minimal time for investment research and allows investors to quickly pick and choose Top Rated Stocks or create a portfolio.
4. Bigger pool of securities – Quant investing can analyze thousands of securities simultaneously because quant is fast. Investment analysts can only cover a handful of stocks and are very limited in comparing a stock to its entire sector.
5. Validation of strategy – Quantitative backtesting has been used to test the effectiveness and validity of the strategy. Seeking Alpha’s backtest goes back to 2010. Quant employs mathematical models and algorithms to make investment decisions. The SA quant model is designed to identify opportunities for buying or selling securities based on predefined, transparent criteria.

Seeking Alpha provides many tools to help understand the risks involved while investing and has a proven ability to identify strong stocks, outperforming the S&P 500 benchmark for many years.

Quant Strong Buy Performance vs. S&P 500

Seeking Alpha emphasizes evaluating your stocks before making an investment decision. If you already have a portfolio with a brokerage or institution or keep a list in a spreadsheet, track your stocks here. Our tools display the Factor Grades on stocks, help you stay informed about market news, and alert you when ratings shift so you can make informed decisions.

Compare stocks’ ratings and Factor Grades

Using a data-driven approach that showcases the weaknesses and strengths of a stock’s financial metrics, our investment tools can instantly grade and break down your stock’s metrics, instantly characterizing how stocks compare to the sector median.

Seeking Alpha Quant vs. Motley Fool: Which Service is Better?

Seeking Alpha Quant Ratings System is crushing Motley Fool’s performance, as evidenced by the performance figures above. We are a high-quality, transparent, low-cost, easy-to-use investing tool with an impressive track record. Last year was challenging for stocks, yet our portfolio in the article Top Stocks for 2022 declined by 3.95%, while Motley Fool’s article on top 10 stocks experienced a significant decline of -53.49%³.

Our secret sauce for investing successfully involves a data-driven process with Quant Ratings and Factor Grades not offered by other services. Identifying stocks that look good on collective investment characteristics like valuation, growth, profitability, momentum, and EPS revisions is crucial. The result is that our quant model identifies stocks with strong investment fundamentals that are mispriced. A great example is Super Micro Computer (SMCI), one of the Top 10 Stocks for 2023, My #1 Stock Pick For 2023, and an Alpha Picks stock, which we’ll discuss later. An investor needs to be able to measure a security’s characteristics, especially in volatile markets, or they stand a greater degree of risk of seeing their assets underperform.

Super Micro Computer Stock Growth Grades and Metrics

Seeking Alpha aims to help you instantly characterize stocks with solid fundamentals and strong investment metrics and avoid poor fundamentals that create portfolio losses. As the table above demonstrates, Seeking Alpha’s platform is very transparent and displays the Factor Grades and absolute data points for stocks like SMCI. All the data points and Factor Grades are updated daily. Notably, the quant Growth grades are generated using consensus estimates from Wall Street analysts. One popular grade is Revisions, which measures the number of professional analysts increasing or decreasing their earnings estimates.

Wall Street Analysts’ Earnings Estimate Revisions Grade

The Growth and Revisions pages exemplify Seeking Alpha’s transparency in showcasing the metrics impacting our overall Buy/Hold/Sell recommendations. Below is a comparison table developed using some of the subjective attributes assessed by Modest Money, which rated Seeking Alpha Premium 4.5 out of 5 stars versus Motley Fool’s 4.3 out of 5 stars.