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.

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David Jackson

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