VirTra Inc (VTSI)

[sharpchicity]

They must have changed their policies since you wrote a few years ago. They are now the worst and if there was another website with equal distribution, I would never even consider posting there. I only did so because the VirTra story is so unknown and it's beneficial for the story to get out to a wider network IMO.

This was my exchange with the editorial staff if you feel like some entertaining reading from this awful website.

While we appreciate the effort, we are going to pass because much of the article consists of quotes from company materials, the investment opportunity is based on speculation about the awarding of a contract that hasn't been announced, and the company is an illiquid microcap. Our microcap guidelines call for focus articles covering liquid stocks that trade for over $1 per share and have a market cap of at least $100M. These guidelines are strictly adhered to for new authors to the site, so we must ask that you choose larger stocks to cover for your first few articles

My response

Am hoping you could reconsider Seeking Alpha's position on this article.
Responding to your points,

"much of the article consists of quotes from company materials" -- My idea of doing this was to let the reader make their own judgement about the company's market fit and opportunity and not think it's the author being presumptuous. I can cut down on some quotes, but I think that would remove some of the clarity on the opportunity that the company is telegraphing.
"the investment opportunity is based on speculation about the awarding of a contract that hasn't been announced" -- Aren't all articles that aren't based purely on financial statement math going to be speculation about something that hasn't been announced? When Amazon built AWS, weren't there articles along the lines of "this is the market, this is how Amazon is positioning themselves, and here's why Amazon is well positioned to win this market"? It takes research to understand the market (What I did with the IVAS), it takes research to understand the company's positioning (company material and transcripts), and it takes industry research (which is what I did by understanding VirTra's patents, their partnerships, changes to their business, contracts that they've won historically which fit with the market). For additional reference, DTEA is an example of being < $100M market cap & < $1 share price and Seeking Alpha still allowed multiple articles "speculating" about its restructuring process which there would be no way to actually know what the creditors would accept without insider information.
"the company is an illiquid microcap" -- Guidelines state that "An article about a stock trading at less than $1 or with a market cap below $100 million will see extra scrutiny but is still eligible for publication." I do not see any mention of liquidity in the Seeking Alpha editorial guidelines as reason to not allow this post.

Prior to March 2021, VirTra was trading 60,000 shares per day. Over the past month, it's averaging above 200,000 shares per day. Additionally, the share price has doubled in the last 6 months. And there's been no coverage on Seeking Alpha explaining why this might be happening. Seeking Alpha has the widest audience which makes this the best place to post as far as reach is concerned and I'd love to help Seeking Alpha be the leading source of research on this name!

I'm happy to tweak the article and remove company quotes as needed if that's what would be required. Please let me know by EOD or I will instead find a different medium to post through.

and their response after a re-review of my submission

Thank you for the submission, Kevin. As Director of Contributor Onboarding, my colleague Richard has asked me to review your article on VTSI. First of all, I want to stress that we strive for a collaborative relationship between contributors and editors, and some of your comments in response to Richard's feedback run counter to that. Please do be more mindful of your communication with editors going forward. That said, I must agree with the prior decline of this article as it continues to have many of the same issues pointed out earlier. Almost two-thirds of the article is quoted directly from the company's website - while some of that info is necessary, you don't want to cede valuable real estate in an article to data aggregation. SA readers are sophisticated investors who can find out that sort of info on their own fairly easily; they come to the site to read an author's own original thoughts and analysis. And note that when it comes to taking text from elsewhere, it must always be clearly delineated via quotation marks and have a source link cited (for example, we see that the very first sentence here is taken from VTSI's website without attribution). Regarding the guidelines for what we consider to be micro-cap companies, note that the rules are a bit more stringent for as-yet-unpublished authors. A contributor's first three pieces are given a high level of scrutiny, and we've found that it's best if he or she has a few under their belt before tackling more risky things such as micro-caps. Given all this, I think it's best that you move on to your next idea and not resubmit on VTSI -- at least until you've become a more established SA author. Feel free to publish this elsewhere, as you suggested you plan to do in your earlier email. We appreciate your understanding.

I actually checked how many quotes I used and while admittedly it's a lot, only 1/3 of my article is quotes and almost none of it quotes from the website besides the initial Company Description section. They almost assuredly didn't even bother reading the article. Additionally, there was not even any back and forth with the editor; it was "we won't allow you to post" both times. I heard similar stories from other posters about not being able to post on similarly valued stocks. So i settled for a blog post such that it at least had the seeking alpha logo on it as i figured it'd get more attention that way than on a smaller investing platform.