Seeking Alpha is a crowd-sourced content service for financial markets founded in 2004 by former Wall Street analyst David Jackson. It is also about the most relevant site for the individual investor. Its philosophy is a play on “wisdom of the crowd” for stocks & bonds. Most sites like Market Beat and others come across as free sites, but in reality are just there to draw you in to get you to pay for their “pro” version. Between Yahoo Finance, MSN Money and Seeking Alpha, I think you’d have to be a very serious investor to make it worthwhile to buy a subscription to the Financial Times, WSJ or some other bigtime publication. About the only pay sight I’m contemplating is the Motley Fool subscription for $99.

[“Alpha is a measure of the so-called active return on an investment, the performance of that investment compared to a suitable market index. An alpha of 1 means the investment’s return on investment over a selected period of time was 1% better than the market during that same period, an alpha of -1 means the investment underperformed the market.”]