What's next after my free trial period of Fonestock?

In my last post I mentioned that you could register and access all software features, including real time quotes for free for a month merely by registering on the Fonestock website or directly through the Fonestock software. It’s easy to do so. From the “more” menu you can click on “setting” after that you'll need to click on “register” and then input your information to open a Fonestock account. Keep in mind that this is just opening an account and you are not required to pay anything just yet. You are just getting yourself ready to enjoy the free 30 days trial of the software with real-time quotes. Later you can use this account to either from the same “more” and “setting” menus in the software register and pay for the paid service or you can go on the Fonestock website to pay.

If you prefer to do everything from the Fonestock website, this is also an available option for you. Just log onto the English website and click on “product,” then “software,” and finally “buy it.” When you reach the “buy it” page you’ll be prompted with some choices. Fonestock software allows you access to stock information from Taiwan, China, and United States indices. Fonestock also provides four different subscription plans: monthly service, monthly service with automatic billing, bi-annual service, and annual service. Each of these service plans have the option of allowing you access to Taiwan, China, and United States indices or any combination of the three. To see the different prices of the packages, simply click which options you’d like to have access too and your shopping cart will automatically be updated with the correct price. Keep in mind that if you choose the monthly service with automatically billing you will continue to be billed automatically each month until you contact Fonestock to cancel the service. After deciding on which package you'd like and adding it to your cart, you’ll first be prompted to log into your account. You should already have an account at this time but if not you still have the option of opening one. Then you need to choose confirm & checkout. Here you will be prompted with the contents of your shopping cart for review. You can make changes before going to the next step, which will ask you to enter your up-to-date contact information. Before this step, you also have the option of saving your shopping cart contents and then come back later to check out. After confirming your contact information, you'll need to enter your credit card information to pay for your subscription purpose. Tha's basically it.

Now that's out of the way, I can get back to introducing some of the features I've discovered that I enjoy about this software.

Single clicking on one of the stocks will take you to a basic stock chart. The chart will present you with some basic information including bid, ask, and last prices as well as what the stock opened for on that day as well as the highest and lowest prices it has sold for today. You can see the actual change in price or percentage as well. The last bit of info provided is the volume in number. The charts in themselves are the most interesting but if you are one of those people that like numbers that is fine as well. This software will suit anyone's needs because it provides both charts and numbers for all the information displayed. At the bottom you will be able to see all the numbers clearly and at the top you are presented with a line chart that shows the progression of the stock price as well as a bar chart that shows the progression of the volume. Simply tilting your iPhone sideways alerts the software to increase the size of the charts and to hide the text. Either in this tilted mode or in the normal vertical mode, a single click on the line chart will allow you to see minute per minute intraday data.

If you slide your finger on your screen from the right to the left, a volume distribution chart will be displayed for you.

As with the other line chart and bar graph, turning your phone sideways will allow you to view a larger scale version. Clicking on the date button allows you to choose to view today, yesterday, two, three, four, or five days ago data. You can also click on the “period” button to change the view to that of either a 5, 10 or 15 day data period. Clicking with your finger on the chart will allow for a line to pop up on your screen that will help you to see the price or volume for any given day that is displayed on the chart. Wherever your finger moves on the chart will allow the numbers to be automatically updated.

I Have Found a Real Gem -- Fonestock

As I promised I am back with more stock software information. This time up for review is Fonestock, a software package also available free-for-download from Apple's app store as well as from other venues. As the saying goes, if you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything at all...well in the case of Fonestock there is a lot then that I have to say! I may end up splitting my comments for this software into two different posts in order to not overwhelm you.

I want you to be able to digest all the information and freely ask questions about specific features of the software.After using this software package and a few others for the past three or four weeks, I have been drawn back to this one again and again. This is why I have decided to stick with using Fonestock to help me track my future stock market interests. Not only does this stock software offer free real time stock quotes without the necessary to pay any fees, but it is very easy to use and provides a lot of information that the other software packages I reviewed did not make available. These real time quotes are available for one month for free.After that, if you like their software you will need to pay the registration fees to continue receiving the service.You will only need to register the software in order to be able to access real time quotes, before that you will only be able to receive delayed quotes.Still, this software seems much safer than other software packages because the registration process only requires you to submit a driver’s license number but not a social security number for software registration.The only drawback that I can find with this software is its weak news provider.

It took me a minute or two to realize that I could link to the news from the intraday chart by clicking on “related news” from the functions button located at the top upper right hand corner of the interday chart screen.Unlike other software packages, unfortunately I don’t seem to be able to link directly from my watchlist. You can, however, like other software packages search the news directly from the main screen you are presented with when you open the software.The news

in Chinese, on the other hand, actually seems to be real news articles detailing events that could impact the stock market.Actually though, I don't really find this as much of a drawback. I can still search for info on any certain stock from within their news provider window.Let me go into a bit more detail about some of the features of the software and why I like it so much.

First of all, I feel the background black color contrasts well with the text and charts, making it easy to read in any environment. The charts are probably what finally drew me to make the decision to stick with this software as my final choice for stock apps available on the iPhone. The first feature that you will first encounter is the Watchlist, here you can create your own personal list that you can follow in real time. There is also a feature that allows you to see all the stocks you are tracking together in a single listing as well.Unlike some of the other software packages, you do not need to know the stock symbol in order to add a company. Knowing the company's name will allow for easy searching of the company and then adding it to your personalized watchlist.

I added a few stocks from some companies from both a Taiwan and a USA exchange and created a list. You can call your list anything like, here I have labeled the list as "My Holdings." When I tap on my "My Holdings" list I'll be taken to a screen that will give me some detailed information about each stock including the symbol, last price, change, change%, etc. and then I can click on any of these headings to rearrange my list either ascending or descending according to the just-clicked heading. You can also while editing your list has the ability to edit the headers as well. More to come tomorrow...

iStock Manager Vs. Bloomberg

I am not exactly sure why, but I'm a bit turned off by iStockManager. It may have something to do with all the inaccessible features of the software. It is offered as a free download but if you pay a fee other features will be unlocked for you. The problem I have with this is that there are to many parts of the screen taken up beckoning you to "go to login" for the paid Ameritrade account. Unlike Bloomberg's software, this software package allows you to not only track your stocks but you can also link it to TD Ameritrade to actually trade your stocks. Also, since I have shelled out the cash for the paid TD Ameritrade account, I can only receive 20 minute delayed quotes of the stocks. I can't get real time quotes the way in which I was able to do with the Bloomberg app. Anyway, I'm not sure that I want to keep using this software or not, just because I'm unhappy about the interface.

As a side note, while using these stock software applications I noticed that sometimes my iPhone automatically will lock and turn off the screen. This gets on my nerves after awhile. I know that it is to save battery life but if I was really trading and every minute counted, I would want some feature to be added to the software that would allow this battery saving feature of the iPhone to be turned off when I had my stock trading software active.

At the top of the screen you are shown the stock prices but that's it. I don't think that is a very intuitive way to present the stock information. Sure I guess I can guess what those numbers mean but I see no reason for not providing some description. You can view a delayed "now" chart, as well as a 5 day, 3 month, 6 month, 1 year, and a 5 year chart. You can also link to news articles concerning this stock but I think the news is really lacking since I got no results for Apple's stock by clicking on the news icon. I went into Bloomberg's app and was able to get news.

One feature that I do like about this app is that from the main screen or the "general" screen you get a 52 week range average and you can see where the price of the stock is falling currently. In my screen shot you can see Apple's stock seems to be a bit in the high range. It would be interesting if I could expand this average to a longer period of time, more than 52 weeks.

I didn't really fiddle around with the screens in relation to the trading features since I did not open an TD Ameritrade account, so I can't give much feedback about those features. I also don't know if it was just my Internet connection but I felt that this app loaded the charts so slowly. I started to get very aggravated after awhile. So then I went into Bloomberg and discovered that the charts and info loaded very quickly, the same for Fonestock as well.

I also really like the feature of being able to just search for the company name instead of being required to input the stock symbol.

After using iStockManger and Bloomberg I'm not really sure if either is the best choice for me. I really do think that Bloomberg offers a great news feature but seems lacking in some aspects. iStockManger seems a little bit better since I can at least see the last 52 weeks average and know a little bit about what is going on with the stock but if you recall some of my earlier posts regarding technical indicators, I believe some of those can really help with making some decisions on when to buy or sell certain stocks, especially in regards to certain patterns that may develop overtime with stocks. But these two software packages have not shown me that they would be able to assist me in any trading decisions.