Wap Review

Yahoo is the most consistent of the major mobile portals in delivering useful content and the mobile edition of Yahoo Finance is particularly well done. Any and all portfolios that you have set up on the Yahoo web site are available on the web. Quotes are quite detailed but only a one-day chart is available. Full length company specific news articles are a real plus. Site is well designed with numeric access keys to speed navigation

The PDA version of MarketWatch has detailed quotes and very good 1 day, 1 week, 3 month, 6 month, 1 year and 5 year charts. Usability is so-so on a phone. If you have a portfolio set up on the MarketWatch web site you can view it on the PDA site, however there is no persistent login you have to enter your email address and password every time which is annoying. News stories are inconsistent, some have considerable depth but most are just headlines.

Detailed quotes with intraday chart. Lots of very brief news headlines. The MarketWatch xhtml and wml sites (unlike the MarketWatch PDA site) do persist your portfolio but don't use a login - relying instead on just a cookie. That means that your portfolio is only on the single handset where you set it up. As there is no login, if the cookie gets deleted or expires you lose your portfolio! In addition the mobile portfolio is not synchronized with the main MarketWatch site.

The mobile version of NASDAQ.com, launched in 2009, offers real-time and after-hours stock quotes, news, charts, commentary and "Guru Analysis", which rates stocks based on the formulas touted by eight different investment analysts. The mobile site which was created by mDog is attractive and easy to navigate and should work well with most mobile browsers, although the site's 42 KB page size may be too large for some feature phone browsers.

NASDAQ, the second largest U.S. stock exchange, was the world's first electronic stock market when it lauched in 1971. Since 1996 the exchange has operated NASDAQ.com, providing investors with quotes, news and investment analysis for stocks traded in all the US markets including NASDAQ, AMEX, NYSE and OTC. In 2006, it was the first U.S.exchange to provide free real time quotes.

Bloomberg's recently redesigned mobile site has U.S,. Asian and European market news, a world index page covering 20 international  and domestic markets, quotes with company snapshot and 12 month chart and a nice portfolio view which is synchronized with the Bloomberg web site. Bloomberg also has a a free app for iPhone, S60, Windows Mobile and Blackberry which can be downloaded from m.bloomberg.com/

The mobile version of eSignal's Quote.com has quotes, charts, international and U.S. domestic company and market news, a most active stocks list, futures and forex quotes and a currency converter. You can create a personalized stock watchlist on Quotes.mobi.  The watchlist is cookie rather than login based. Source: Mobility.mobi

U.S. discount stock broker Scottrade has a new mobile site with a rich feature set.  Public features, available without login, include market research and news (markets overview, statistics, news & commentary, analyst views and a brief market calendar), stock quotes and research (news & commentary, charts, options, fundamentals, insider transactions, earnings, financials and a stock screener), ETF quotes and research (news & commentary, charts, options, performance, portfolio, expenses, Lipper rankings and ETF screener).

Scottrade customers can log in to make trades and view detailed balances, positions and order status.

The site is clearly designed for (and looks best on) advanced handsets with good CSS support like the iPhone.  It also works perfectly in Opera Mini, the Symbian Webkit browser, BlackBerry and Android devices although the rounded corner buttons have an jagged appearance in these browsers. 

I'm a firm believer in mobile sites supporting as many devices as possible. The Scottrade site doesn't do too well on non-smartphones. It has fairly modest page sizes of under 30 KB and the public features of the site are at least functional on the Openwave browsers found on many feature phones. Appearance and usabilitry with the Openwave browsers is marred by big banners demanding that JavaScript be turned on, which is impossible as these browsers have no Javascript support. As the site seems to work on browsers without JavaScript the warning seems unnecessary especially as it appears on every page.  Nokia S40 phones with the legacy "Services" browser are able to load Scottrade Mobile, but the site is almost unusable on these phones because of a variety of problems including unreadable background/foreground color combinations and text columns only a couple of characters wide.

Live quotes and charts for major US, European and Asian stock market indexes, foreign exchange rates and oil futures.

Vanguard Funds is a large US mutual fund house specializing in no-load, low cost index funds.  I'm a Vanguard customer and I like the company but I'm disappointed by their mobile site at vanguard.mobi (you will need a mobile browser to see the mobile version). There isn't much content and usability is not as good as it could be.

Vanguard.mobi can be used by anyone, whether they have a Vanguard account or not, to view the current value of four major US market indexes and read financial and market news sourced from Reuters.  That's assuming you can actually read the text. Vanguard.mobi's stylesheet sets the font size of various elements on the page to between 40 and 70 percent of normal.  Many mobile browsers ignore font size, but for ones that honor it, like NetFront (lower image), Vanguard.mobi is very hard to read at default browser settings.  It's good practice on both the full web and the mobile web to use the default or 100% font size for main text, virtually guaranteeing that it will display it in a readable size.

For Vanguard customers there is an enticing "My Portfolio" link.  To get to your account you have to log in, of course.  That's another area where usability breaks down. The mobile site's log in link takes you to a non-mobile formatted log in form that requires you to answer  an additional security question and verify your personal security image.  The log in process was cumbersome, but at least possible in testing with the Openwave browser found on many low end phones. It didn't work at all with the Motorola MIB browser found on many of that company's feature phones. Log in isn't persistent so you have to repeat the process every time.

Upon finally reaching my portfolio, I was disappointed that all I could do was view the last 72 hours worth of transactions and the combined dollar balance of the entire portfolio. There is no way to drill down and view the performance of the individual funds making up the portfolio.

I really wish Vanguard.mobi were a little more useful.  I'd like to see some of the features of Vanguard's full web site extended to mobile like the ability to research current prices and yields of individual funds, set up watch lists and view more detailed information about my own portfolio's performance.

The Ameritrade site offers detailed delayed quotes on US securities to all users. If you have an Ameritrade account you can execute trades and get real-time quotes and email alerts.

Fidelity, a big online brokerage and mutual fund company has an excellent mobile site. Customers with Fidelity accounts can view their portfolios with real-time quotes and execute trades. Everyone, including non-customers, can get delayed quotes and read an extensive collection of in depth news articles including both company specific news and general business news.

Discount stock broker Etrade has enhanced their mobile site for customers with a portfolio view, online trading and real time quotes. Other features available to customers and non-customers alike are detailed quotes with company news, market summary and a branch locater.

Charles Schwab is a major online discount brokerage with a well rounded mobile site. Schwab account holders can execute trades and everyone can view quotes with an intraday chart. There is also both general business news and company specific news. News articles appear to be edited for brevity but are long enough to be useful.

Selftrade is a large UK stock broker. The mobile site provides stock and currency quotes, market trends and news, watch lists and online trading. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Stock quotes, exchange rates and charts for securities traded on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange for South African online brokerage Sharenet.  Source: Mobility.mobi

Official site of the National Stock exchange of India has quotes with charts and lists the  leading advances and declines, most active stocks and currency futures. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

Real Time quotes, security and foreign exchange trading for customers of Denmark's Saxo Bank. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

Mobile access to Oanda's foreign exchange trading platform including live and practice trades.  Registration required.

For serious research, the best mobile investment site is StockPoint's PDA site. I'm surprised that the site exists at all. StockPoint.com as an financial web site disappeared about the time that it's parent company, Pinnacor was acquired by MarketWatch in 2003. But the mobile edition of Stockpoint is still up and running with current data and is a real treasure trove for mobile using investors. While you can't create a portfolio, there are fast loading 1 day, 1 week, 3 month, 6 month, 1 year and 5 year charts. But the best feature is the wealth of data on fundamentals. Nowhere else on the mobile web can you find data like Average Daily Volume, Price/Sales, Price/Book, Price/Cash Flow, Market Capitalization, Shares Outstanding, Float, Earnings, Sales, Book Value, Cash Flow, Cash Reserves, Dividend Yield, Annual Dividend, Payout Ratio, Return on Equity, Return on Assets, Quick Ratio, Current Ratio, LT Debt/Equity, Total Debt/Equity, Gross Margin, Operating Margin and Profit Margin (fourth image). Their is also a table of analyst rankings StockCharts.com showing the number of analysts ranking a stock as a Buy, Hold or Sell, etc. In addition to the US site, StockPoint also has sites for the UK, German (in German) and Italian (in Italian) exchanges.

2-Dec-2008: This site deems to be slowly dying. Quotes and charts still work but the news and comentary sections come up blank or show errors.

StockCharts.com features 6 week and 6 month "candlestick" charts with moving averages which are popular with technical analysis proponents. Charts are all that there is on the site, no quotes or news,