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Alex King: Hi, everyone, it’s Alex King. I’m the Investing Group Leader of the Growth Investor Pro service here on Seeking Alpha. I’m the Founder of Cestrian Capital Research, who publishes Growth Investor Pro.
I’m here to talk to you today about Seeking Alpha Premium products, something I use each and every day. I’ll talk to you about the three things that I use the Premium product for, and I’ll share the screen with you right now and walk you through how I personally use it.
So three functions for me, literally every day that I do this. So the first of which is if I’m looking up a particular ETF and I want to know the top 10 holdings. Once you’ve been more familiar with an ETF, you know the fund manager that runs it, you can use their site, of course.
But at first blush, if I want to know the main components, I’ll always go to Seeking Alpha Premium. So let’s say I want to look at two semiconductor sector ETFs. I might be interested in SOXX.
So I might click this, look at holdings right here, and see that this is a fairly well-balanced ETF, not too much overweight in any of the big names. And if that is of further interest to me, then I might go to the fund manager’s website and find out what the other 40% of the holdings are.
At this level of analysis though, I might first of all be interested in what roughly moves the ETF every day. So I might be also interested in SMH, another sector, semiconductor sector ETF. And I might look at that and I might notice that this was heavily weighted towards NVIDIA and I might think about what to do about that, whether I want a sector ETF that’s so heavily concentrated, or like I said, a bit more distributed. So ETF holdings, top 10 holdings, big usage point for me.
Next one is individual name stocks. So obviously, we can all read anywhere on the Internet, all across social media, numerous people’s opinion on any stock you can think of. But what remains a really unique function of Seeking Alpha is you have a really wide range of skilled analysts that are writing up their ideas about stocks on the site. And, of course, the site keeps track of, well, how good were their ideas.
So you can work out whether over a period of time, analysts that cover stocks you’re interested in are actually right or not. And no one’s right all the time, but you know, in general, does their analysis prove broadly correct?
So let’s say, I was interested in Rocket Lab, RKLB, it’s a stock that’s somewhat of the moment. And I might think, well, there’s lots of folks covering this. There’s a number of good analysts in this list, but I personally would probably go straight to Dhierin Bechai. He’s an aerospace sector analyst. And so I know this isn’t someone that’s just latterly jumped on the stock. This is somebody who has written up aerospace at Seeking Alpha for a very, very long time and will come at Rocket Lab from a strictly sector fundamentals basis and then talk about the stock price performance.
So this is his latest article. I can see from his calls here that he’s been bullish for some time and that’s proved correct. So that will increase my faith in the chances of the opinion in this article being right and I might start my research there and, of course, look at other people’s as well. We have no connection with Dhierin, by the way. I just happen to like his work, as I do many other analysts on the site.
And then the third thing I might do is actually see ETFs themselves also get write ups, of course, Here’s one that we did recently, ETHA, Ethereum, as you know, something of a hot topic at the moment. And so very often people read this often will write up a particular ETF as a way of commenting on a sector. And so even if you’re not interested in particularly this specific ETF, it might be a way to learn different analysts’ opinion on the sector.
Finally, earnings transcripts. So earnings transcripts are important. Some companies don’t include everything you need in the earnings press release. And whilst in the end, it will be in the SEC filing, that’s often some hours or days later. Microsoft’s a good example of that. We cover Microsoft in our work.
And so whenever we’re writing up Microsoft earnings, I always use the transcript function in Seeking Alpha. There’s lots of places again on the Internet you can get transcripts, but I trust Seeking Alpha to have good quality transcripts issued quickly, easy to find, easy to navigate.
So if I was interested in Q2, I’d go here, and then I might decide to play the call. And if I’m driving somewhere and I want to catch up on a company, I’ve done that with Taiwan Semiconductor on the platform before, for instance. But here, let’s say, I’m interested in two particular things. Two things that Microsoft holds back into its earnings calls are guidance. So I can either scroll through or I can just do a simple text search. There we go, segment guidance. An oddity that we like to use in our work is remaining performance obligation, basically the order book. And I know that if I text search here, then I can find that for Microsoft as well. And usually, for most companies, you won’t find RPO in the press release, one or two exceptions, but mostly you won’t.
So there’s some functions that I use Seeking Alpha Premium for every day. Number one, look at ETF top level composition; number two, look at individual stock or ETF tickers to see what analysts whose opinion I rate are saying about them; and three, earnings transcripts.
I hope that’s helpful to you. Once again, I’m Alex King. I’m the Investing Group Leader at Growth Investor Pro provided by Cestrian Capital Research here on Seeking Alpha. If you’re interested in our group, do click the link below this video where you can learn more about what we do. Thanks, again, and do reach out if there’s anything else we can help with.
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