I spend a lot of time on this blog and on my podcast discussing new tools and services available to individual investors. Most of these firms help us make better, more accurate, investment decisions (cheaper, too).
What gets lost sometimes is how new some of these services are. While Betterment may have 10,000 funded accounts, it still has less than $30M assets under management and has been taking investor money for over a year.
Covestor and Wealthfront may be online investing’s high school seniors — around for 4 years — but they’re still looking for the big-gun approach to bring in billions under management.
Even advice-driven investment sites like FutureAdvisor (hear my interview with co-founder here) and Jemstep (interview here), are relatively new and just beginning to make their tracks with investors.
As bloggers, journos or just plain arm-chair pundits, we run the risk of mixing in the unproven firms with some of the long, hard grunt work put in by the handful of next generational financial sites that have truly “made it”.
Seeking Alpha: The “Grandaddy” of New Financial Media
So, it really means something when Seeking Alpha (FD: I used to work there and still own a small amount of shares) announced this morning that it surpassed 1MM registered users — adding another 2k every market day.
That’s a lot of users and it’s understandable when you see that global usage of the investment opinion site is ramping.
SA’s numbers are impressive:
- 1MM registered users
- 2k signups every market day
- 8000 comments/month
- 5-7MM unique visitors per month (almost 10% of which are finance professionals)
- 250 articles published every day
So, congrats to Seeking Alpha and its founder, David Jackson. I pretty sure we’ll still be reading about SA when we talk about the next generation of financial sites.