New on Seeking Alpha: 400th Contributor, Barron's on Biotech, Conference Presentation Transcripts, The Daily Deal

Seeking Alpha's 400th Contributor

Seeking Alpha recently added its 400th and 401st contributors. Contributor number 400 is Scott Rothbort, the founder of LakeView Asset Management and a contributor to TheStreet.com. We published a one-off article by Scott in June 2005, but now he's a regular contributor to Seeking Alpha. Take a look at his thought provoking article challenging Peter Lynch's investment philosophy, 5 Examples of When 'Buy What You Know' Doesn't Pay.

Contributor number 401 is venture debt investor Mark McQueen, whose most recent article -- US Mortgage Liquidity Crisis Spreading to Private Equity -- provides a single but important anecdotal data point about the spread of the subprime mortgage crisis into other forms of debt.

We're excited to have them on board, and you'll see from Scott's author page and Mark's author page that they both have stellar resumes. A big welcome to them both. If you're interested in becoming a contributor, you can do so here.

Barron's on Biotech

Kathy Yakal, author of Barron's excellent Electronic Investor column, wrote about online resources for biotech investors this weekend. This is what she said about biotech blogs:

I looked for good biotech blogs (you can, too, by going to www.technorati.com and searching for "biotech" in the blog directory or tags fields) and found many that weren't updated very frequently.

The best still comes from the Seeking Alpha network of blogs. Biotech Stocks (biotech.seekingalpha.com) does a great job of explaining both science and its impact on the markets. Topics include biotech research, equipment and diagnosis; long and short ideas; and sell-side research. The blog also posts free conference-call transcripts -- the only site I've viewed that offers such a service gratis.

Investment Conference Transcripts

Seeking Alpha's Ezra Marbach is working to get transcripts of companies' presentations at investment conferences up on Seeking Alpha. This is a particularly valuable service for our readers, because these transcripts aren't carried by the expensive subscription-based transcript services, and because the presentations provide profiles of small cap and micro cap companies that are often hard to find information about.

So far we're carrying presentation transcripts from B Riley Conference, the Roth Capital Conference, the Red Chip Conference and the Wall Street Analyst Forum.

Conference organizers, IR firms and companies interested in getting their presentation transcript on Seeking Alpha should email Ezra.

Easier Access to Sector Transcripts

As we expand our provision of free transcripts, we're working to make them more accessible and usable for readers. Until now we've had a page that displays transcripts as they are published for people looking for the most recent transcripts, and we've displayed links to transcripts on our stock pages (look at the Google stock page, for example) for people looking for resources on a known stock.

But transcripts are also a useful resource for investors who who want to monitor and browse a sector without knowing the specific stocks they are looking for. So we've displayed transcripts more clearly by sector. Our sector home pages -- for example for Energy Stocks -- now show the latest transcripts for that sector in a yellow box.

The Daily Deal

The March 12th edition of The Daily Deal carried a profile of Seeking Alpha in its Venture Capital section, with the tag line "SeekingAlpha.com's stock market analysis, tips and opinions gain credence among investors". In the thoughtful article, Andrea Orr wrote:

While there has never been a shortage of prognosticating about stock picking or anything else on the Internet, there seems to be a difference with Seeking Alpha. People are taking its content seriously."

Seeking Alpha's Inbox

This week we published a selection of emails we get at Seeking Alpha from readers. Contributors have emailed me to say that they get appreciative emails from readers who discover them via Seeking Alpha. But I particularly wanted to publish this article so our contributors can see the appreciation for their work that is sent to us, not them.

Here's What Readers Say About Seeking Alpha.

Have a great weekend,
David Jackson