Seeking Alpha Announces Free Conference Call Transcripts for 2,500 U.S. Companies

I'm pleased to announce that Seeking Alpha is expanding its conference call transcript coverage to 2,500 companies.

When I was a sell-side research analyst, I always felt that analysts' earnings notes were less informative than the transcripts of the companies' own conference calls. The prepared remarks contained the company's presentation of its business and quarterly results, and the question and answer session pinpointed the issues that surprised or concerned investors and analysts.

The easiest way to know what a company has said on its conference call is to read the transcript. Transcripts solve the problem of multiple companies holding calls at the same time. They also allow investors to skim, and skip to the Q&A or other sections that are most impactful. Because of these advantages, conference call transcripts have long been a critical resource for professional investors.

Until Seeking Alpha started publishing free transcripts, individual investors were priced-out of this resource. Moreover, conference calls contain valuable business information for partners, industry watchers and competitors. But the wider business community was generally unable to meet the high price points asked by the legacy transcript providers, The Thomson Corp.'s (TOC) StreetEvents and FactSet Research Systems' (FDS) CallStreet.

We're excited to have overturned the status quo. Our coverage this quarter will be vast, extending to five times the number of companies in the S&P 500. (If you want to know which companies we'll cover, the list is basically the top 2,500 companies by market cap that hold earnings calls.) Transcripts should be available no later than six hours after the conference call ends, matching the expensive subscription services. We think the quality of our transcription is better.

We're investing many hundreds of thousands of dollars in this project, but we think it's worth it. Our free transcript project is already changing the landscape: Companies that provide services for investment professionals understand that a key resource is now free, and have approached us about linking to and excerpting from our transcripts. And the transcripts are fully searchable: a search for Asus on Seeking Alpha, for example, turns up all the companies that said on their conference calls that they provide components for the Asus Eee ultra-light laptop.

There are 4 ways to access the transcripts:

1. View the most recent transcripts.
2. Search for transcripts by stock symbol (or by phrase) in our search box, from any page on Seeking Alpha.
3. Each stock symbol has a unique page for that company's transcripts with a standard URL, allowing you to change the symbol in the URL to quickly access all the transcripts for another company. Here, for example, is Google's: http://www.seekingalpha.com/articles/list?tags=transcripts,goog . Replace "goog" with another stock symbol, and you'll get all the transcripts for that stock.
4. Those tracking a particular industry can view transcripts by sector by going to our sector home pages, such as the Energy Sector, where you'll see a list of the most recent energy sector transcripts on the right hand side of the page.

We hope you'll find them useful. In future, we hope to increase our coverage further to well over 3,000 companies, and we plan to offer the most powerful transcript search in the industry.

Comments

[Phil G.]

A wonderful service to the investment community - thanks!

[Kunst]

This is really great. Transcripts give you a good feel for the company's situation and management. For example, read Circuit City's most recent and see how clueless their leadership is.

[James Cullen]

I second Phil - immensely helpful information and I'm thankful you guys do this!

[Chungst]

When I was a Buy-Side analyst, earnings-transcripts were a must read to scan for sales, margins, earnings, cash-flow and ROIC inputs. Now that I'm no longer working for an asset management firm, I realize how much of a disadvantage the little guy has versus the professionals and the free transcripts service is a big help. Thank you.

[T Muller]

It's tremendous.

Some providers have charged up to $100 for a single transcript, and a couple times I've paid for it when I didn't have time to listen. Few occasions I've hired interns to do it for a fraction of that cost. (if help can be found)

The value of a text format is immense. Co's couldn't charge outrageous prices if transcripts weren't so beneficial.

To me, the only value of listening is when it's live, other than that it's very tedious and time consuming dealing with audio.

Transcripts really sets this site apart from anything else. It's huge.

thanks- keep up the great work

[DanielJacome]

SA = paradigm of democratized investment research. Kudos.

[DanielJacome]

forget CC, best call all year was SLM - the CEO pulled a "jeff skilling" on us and cursed at the sell siders. What an idiot, CEO says the "f word" + the stock tanks over 25% over the next 2 days.

[T Muller]

SLM- What a classic. CEO A. Lord: Where do they find these guys. On the call told analysts he will address questions in person in Jan meeting.....

"I will be prepared to take all of your questions and I would suggest maybe you get there early because .......I can assure you, you’ll be going through a metal detector."

Gotta remember to get there early!

[Kunst]

I don't even know what SLM is and I want to buy it!