iPhone Stock Market apps

Besides giving readers an inside perspective of an American living in Taiwan, this blog is also about chronicling my knowledge and understanding of stocks. Since I have my iPhone 3G with me everywhere I go, I thought it would be a good idea to take advantage of this device by downloading some apps from the apple app store that could give me some insights into the stock market. Since I am tight with money, I decided to limit my downloading of apps to those that are available for free. I chose some popular ones as well as some less popular ones. I hope to play around with them in the next few weeks and talk a little bit about the advantages and disadvantages of each. Actually I just want to see which of these apps I find the easiest to use and the most helpful. I've decided to start my exploration with the following four apps, all available for free from the apps store on your iPhone: Bloomberg, iStockManager, Fonestock and iSwim.

The first is Bloomberg. The free for download iPhone app provides the basics with an easy to read and navigate interface. The black background is very easy on the eyes. The menus provided for you are News, Markets, My Stocks, and Stock Finder. The Stock Finder option allows you to search for stocks from a variety of Markets (Exchanges) without the need to already know which index it belongs to. Also a handy feature is that there is no need to know a stock's "symbol" to search. You only need to enter the company. For example, have a look at my search for a Taiwanese telecommunications company, Chunghwa Telecom Co. Ltd. The search option does not require me to first select the Taiwan Stock Exchange first before searching.

I also find the news feature really handy. For example, after I searched for Chunghwa Telecom, I was able to add it to my personal portfolio in the "My Stocks" folder. Here I am able to access and follow my stocks easily on a daily basis. From this screen I am presented with a screen that shows the current High, Low, Volume of the day as well as the time accessed. A 52 week set as default summary of the stock high, low, P/E, Return and Market Capital is shown beside a 52 Week summary chart. Simply tilt your iPhone sideways to have the chart expanded. Here you have the option to view 1 day, 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, or 5 years chart. The charts displayed show dates, prices, and volume. I am prevented from seeing specific days. I can only view the information provided in the chart and it shows little information for each day, only the high price and the volume for that specific time.

When viewing "My Stocks" I also found the feature of being able to easily click on the column headings in order to change the displayed information. It's quite handy and easy to do. For example, in the photos below I am first looking at the Change but after clicking on the column heading "Chg" I can see the percentage of Change "% Chg" for all the stocks in "My Stocks." I think this is one of the most convenient features of this app.

Let me also briefly give definitions for three terms I have yet to use on the blog: To state it in the most concise number of words P/E refers to P/E ratio or price-to-earnings ratio. You may hear or see it written as "P/E", "PER", "earnings multiple," or "multiple." This number refers to the price paid for a share of a stock in relation to the annual profit earned by the firm per share. A higher P/E ratio means that investors are paying more per share so of course the stock is more expensive. Likewise, a low P/E would indicate a lower priced stock. You may want to briefly visit Wikipedia for a quick summary of Market Capital and Return.

The features that I like the best is the "Related News," which allows you to link directly to news that is related to the stock you are following and as a result may have some influence on this company's stock. I also feel it's helpful to see company data on the first page you are shown for any stock you decide to follow. Besides, the News feature in itself is quite interesting to me. I surf the news sometimes just as an interesting source for news when I'm on the train or bus going to and from school. You can even contact the reporter of that particular news article if you like, simply by linking directly from the article. You can also easily email articles with a single click in this app.

Besides the difficulty I mentioned above by not being able to view any type of chart except for the basic line chart (for example: no candle stick charts), there also seems to be no alert feature that could allow me for example to be emailed or messaged when and if a stock reached a certain bid price. Just as a refresher, recall that the bid price refers to the highest price that a buyer (i.e., bidder) is willing to pay for a good. In the context of stock trading, the ask price is the lowest price a seller of a stock is willing to accept for a share of that given stock. Of course it also doesn't offer any option for trading stocks as well. I am not going to delete it from my iPhone yet. I think the news resources are quite valuable to me.