If you’re a serious stock-stalker and looking for a robust financial app that lets you monitor the market on the go, this app’s for you.
iPhone apps that help you manage your stock market investments. It allows you to track multiple portfolios separately, graph market data and trade to your heart’s content. Now that the economy seems to be in a cautious recovery stage, you’ll hopefully be watching your portfolio rebound, and this app is a great tool for doing that.
It’s also a good tool for market newcomers to get familiar with how to handle their own transactions.
Turing Studios provides more than 30 minutes of video tutorials detailing the app’s features. These include how to create a portfolio and start trading, setting up international portfolios and working with multiple currencies, options and other instruments. I found the videos to be very helpful in navigating all the features and learning how to set up my portfolio and get going with some of the more advanced options.
PortfolioLive offers a custom home page to show markets, charts, headlines and news about stocks in your portfolio. You can decide exactly what information you want the snapshot screen to display, as well as if you want to see graphs, news, headlines, markets in general or specific stocks you’re watching. The settings provide a variety of general options, trading defaults, chart designs, a fetch timer, passcode lock and data maintenance.
The fetch timer offers several options from continuous (as quickly as possible) to battery saver (every 60 seconds). Rest assured, the app won’t drain your battery fetching new data all day—it only fetches new data when you have the app open and are actively using it. You can also choose whether you want to fetch data from Yahoo Finance or Google Finance.
No app is without a few downsides, though. The articles in the news tab are only snapshots with a few sentences. Also, some of the featured columnists’ most recent work is from 2006 and 2007.
The passcode lock option (found in settings) lets you set a 4-digit PIN to protect your data; however, if you enter an incorrect code five times in a row, the app will lock for 10 minutes before you can access it again. If you forget your PIN there is no retrieval system through the app or the developer’s website, meaning you’ll have to reinstall the app and will lose your stored data.
Still, PortfolioLive is worth the $5.99 price. If you want to stay keenly aware of what’s happening on Wall Street and in your accounts, it’s a fine tool.
