Investing Apps: Taking Online Finance to the Next Level

I’m thrilled to officially launch Seeking Alpha’s Investing Applications today and tell you a bit about why we launched Investing Apps. First, what are Investing Apps? Investing Apps are professional-grade tools to research stocks, and manage, track and analyze your investments. These apps are provided by other companies but are carefully screened by us. Apple's App Store is for mobile, Facebook apps are for social networking and gaming, and Seeking Alpha apps are for investing. We are building the best way to discover and use investing apps on the web, by making them available in one place and at reasonable prices. For additional details, see today’s press release. Why did we launch a platform for Investing Apps? In five years, Seeking Alpha has built a wide and varied audience. We have over 3.5 million monthly unique visitors and over 560,000 registered users, representing a wide range of investing types – from retirees to financial professionals, hedge fund managers and more. Many of our readers are looking for something specific from Seeking Alpha. Some people are looking to generate income from their portfolios from dividends and bonds; some are looking for long or short ideas; some are focused on ETFs, while others are primarily interested in market commentary or, say, tech industry analysis. Over the past few years, we’ve been approached by tens of companies wanting to partner with us to offer their investing products to our readership. The problem was that most of these products appealed only to a subset of our readers, and we didn’t want to clutter Seeking Alpha with functionality that many people wouldn’t use. The solution, we realized, was to offer a choice of tools that our users could select from, to fit their own needs and interests, and a platform which would allow partners to easily integrate their products into Seeking Alpha. This way, we’d offer a ‘menu’ of Apps but it would be our users themselves that would choose which ones they wished to see and use. Personalization is the Goal There are more than 25 Applications live on the platform today serving a wide variety of user needs, from stock screeners to charting tools to portfolio tracking Apps.Complete Story »