Yes, when we talked about the policy, we made darn sure to frame it such that members would feel comfortable writing on Seeking Alpha and other places like that. It’s more than OK. It’s a terrific thing, and as R2G accommodates a broader potential customer base, I think it will be a very valuable part of a designer’s marketing strategy. That’s why I encourage people to spend some time on Seeking Alpa and learning the ways of that community.
Here’s an important tip.
Seeking Alpha will publish articles on models, strategies, etc., but if you want decent traffic, or even any traffic, you need to be focusing on individual stocks, enough so to justify editors’ willingness to identify your articles with primary ticker. Now personally, I absolutely HATE this aspect of Seeking Alpha and have argued with them repeatedly about their lack of appreciation for strategic articles in general (like I said, they’ll publish them, but they’ll scroll off the home page in an hour or so and then be impossible to find). Unfortunately, this is the way financial media is. It sucks. But it’s what we need to live with.
So in a sense, I almost should take back my cautions about writing about optimization. Getting blasted by commenters may be the least of your problems. If you write that way, pretty much nobody will find your article or read it except for p123 friends with whom you share links.
They key: DON’T TRY TO SELL YOUR MODEL; SELL YOURSELF (and of course you would promote your model(s) in your profiles and whenever you can mention them in passing in your articles).
You really need to be talking about stocks if you want to get traffic to your articles. While the big names (AMZN, AAPL, GOOG, etc.) will always draw, note that small cap does particularly well on Seeking Alpha, and income does super well. So I suggest you write about stocks in your models that particularly appeal to you – explain what you like and why. Less sexy big names can also draw traffic. And by all means, you can write about stocks you hate – bears gain followings. This is a challenge for those who rebalance weekly. So it’s a heck of a good reason to ditch the weeklies and emphasize 4- or 13-week models. You may not get the alphas you can get with 5-dayh (although that’s a loaded statement anyway; I p[refer 4 weeks), but longer rebalancing intervals create better opportunities for you talk about stocks (i.e. they won’t be gone by the time an article gets through the editing backlog and up onto the site).
If you don’t feel comfortable analyzing and talking about individual stocks, use the time available to you while the R2G project is underway to practice. I suggest practicing in the forums. Write posts on stocks. Ask for feedback. I’ll help if anyone wants.
Once you build SA followers by writing about stocks and having people who like what you wrote click to follow you, you then have the luxury of getting a bit more strategic since your followers will always be able to easily find whatever you write.
. You won’t find outside forums populated by familiar people and are instead likely to find yourself surrounded by many who think exactly the way I do on this issue and who may not be at all that shy about expressing themselves in hostile or demanding ways. (Seeking Alpha forums are moderated, but you can get away with quite a lot of negativity before something is taken down.) In fact, I have, at times, jumped into SA forums to defend the approaches of some modelers, including some from p123, who were attacked for data mining even when they were not guilty of having done it.