This month marks the seventh anniversary of the publication of my first article on Seeking Alpha. I was initially drawn to the site by a link showing there was a conference call transcript for Sirius XM Holdings (SIRI). Despite having invested in stocks since 1972, I had never listened to a conference call nor read a conference call transcript. To be fair, it wasn't until the implementation of Regulation Fair Disclosure that a publicly traded company was mandated to disclose all material information to all investors at the same time. This led to changes that resulted in analyst presentations and conference calls becoming public events and the subsequent Safe Harbor statements that are part of the current presentations.

And, while that Sirius transcript was interesting, it was the comments that led me to bookmark the Seeking Alpha website. Sirius was a stock that had barely escaped bankruptcy a few years earlier and there were a number of contributors writing on the company, several of whom had their own web-based subscription services devoted to the stock. I had learned a lot from many of those articles and even more from some of those that took the time to write substantive comments.

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