I’ve been trying to build up a little money for retirement and lately I’ve been dabbling in the stock market. I use the mobile web during my two hour round trip commute on the train to try to learn more about the market and research stocks I’m considering. What follows is my assessment of current mobile investment sites. Keep in mind that I’m not a sophisticated investor, these are just my personal observations – mainly on the depth of content and usability of mobile finance sites.<\/p>\n
In general, I’m rather disappointed by the mobile investment sites I’ve found. On the full web, sites like Yahoo Finance, MarketWatch and MSN Money are very comprehensive with Company profiles, news, loads of data on past performance, graphs of arcane technical analysis indicators, stock rating tools and columns by stock pickers like MSN’s Jim Jubak and TheStreet.com’s Jim Cramer.<\/p>\n
Sadly the mobile versions of these sites restrict themselves to only bare bones information. MSN has just opening and current price, change, percentage change and daily and 52 week high and low. Yahoo’s a little better, adding an intra-day chart, 52 week high\/low, P\/E, EPS, Market Cap, dividend per share and yield.<\/p>\n
Even the online brokerage’s mobile sites are lacking many of the features I want. I use E-Trade as my broker and I can’t even execute a trade on their mobile site<\/a>. All they currently offer are basic quotes. E-Trade does promise to add news, a portfolio view and on-line trading “soon”. Ameritrade<\/a>, Schwab<\/a> and Fidelity<\/a> are better, offering trading and basic quotes similar to Yahoo’s. Fidelity and Schwab also have nice 1d, 5d, 2m, 6m, 1y, 5y charts.<\/p>\n
Needless to say, I didn’t find my ideal site. My top priority is portfolios. That limits the choices to Yahoo<\/a>, MSN, Bloomberg<\/a> and MarketWatch (both PDA<\/a> and xhtml<\/a> versions) plus Ameritrade, Schwab or Fidelity if you have a brokerage account with one of them. Bloomberg, MSN and Yahoo all have good handheld navigation and persistent login. I currently prefer Yahoo (top image) because it has more detail in the quotes than MSN and excellent full length company news stories, much better than the news on MSN or Bloomberg. I also want to like MarketWatch which has several versions. There is a PDA site with detailed quotes and very good charts (third image) but so-so usability on a phone and no persistent login. The MarketWatch xhtml and wml sites are much more limited in their features. They 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! All of these sites display your portfolio in a list of symbols, prices and change amounts, handy for scanning a group of stocks quickly. Bloomberg (second image) even lets you customize the list with your choice of any 3 of 11 columns.<\/p>\n
For serious research, the best mobile investment site is StockPoint’s PDA<\/a> 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 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.<\/p>\n
The only site with stock picks and recommendations that actually works is TheStreet.com<\/a> which features Jim Cramer’s column. MotleyFool.com<\/a> used to be good for stock picks and general market news but the site has been broken for about a month now – the page comes up with just the header and footer boiler-plate and an empty space where the articles should be. I hope it gets fixed as I miss The Fool.<\/p>\n
Yahoo Finance: wml\/xhtml-mp<\/a>
\nContent: Usability:
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Bloomberg: xhtml-mp<\/a>
\nContent: Usability:
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MarketWatch PDA: cHtml<\/a>
\nContent: Usability:
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StockPoint: cHtml<\/a>
\nContent: Usability:
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StockCharts.com: cHtml<\/a>
\nContent: Usability:
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been trying to build up a little money for retirement and lately I’ve been dabbling in the stock market. I use the mobile web during my two hour round trip commute on the train to try to learn more about the market and research stocks I’m considering. What follows is my assessment of current mobile investment sites. Keep in mind that I’m not a sophisticated investor, these are just my personal observations – mainly on the depth of content … Continue reading