StockTouch Is The Way To Watch The Stock Market On Your iPhone And iPad
StockTouch ($4.99) by Visible Market Inc. is an intuitive and visually pleasing way to check out how the stock market is doing.
Normally, I’m not a big fan of the stock market. I don’t own any, so I don’t really have a big interest in it. However, I stumbled upon StockTouch and fell in love with the interface and visuals – this made stocks interesting! At least for me, and I hope the same can be said for you.
When the app is first opened, you will get a help overlay that will explain how StockTouch organizes stocks. Basically, stocks are organized by their sector, and the top 100 companies of that sector will spiral clockwise from the center.
There are nine sectors: Consumer, Services, Healthcare, Energy, Technology, Financial, Industrial, Materials, and Utilities. These sectors will also display the percentage that the rose or fell as well, so you can get a general overview. Tapping on a sector will take you to the top 100 companies, with the largest spiraling out from the center.
If you’re interested in a company, just tap on its block. StockTouch will present you with three pages of information. The first page includes basic information on the company, including: closing price and percent change, previous open and close, market cap, volume/average, P/E, dividend yield, and price for today and over a 52-week period. Swiping to then next page will provide a graph of the stock’s performances, and the last page has recent news items (opening these will take you to Safari).
On the right hand side of the app is an always-there toolbar with several options: Search, U.S./Global, Price/Volume, Sort, Timeframe, Show Indices, Refresh Data, and Help.
The Search function allows you to search for a company quickly. StockTouch searches in real-time as you type, so the results will be instant. If the company you were looking for is in the top 100 of a sector, the block will glow white so you can easily locate it. A pretty nice touch, actually.
The U.S./Global button allows you to do just that: switch between the U.S. and global markets. The Price/Volume button gives you four display options to choose from: Price Change (percentage), Volume (relative trading activity), vs S&P 500 (price change relative to S&P 500), and vs Sector (price relative to average change). Viewing the Volume activity will also turn the sectors and stock blocks from shades of red and green into a specific color, representative of the sector. Arrange has three options for how stocks should be shown for each sector: Spiral (large to small in spiral pattern), Market Cap (largest to smallest), and Alphabetical (arranged by company name).
StockTouch also allows you to view several different timeframes. By tapping on the button that looks like a calendar, you can access one day, one week, one month, three months, six months, one year, or five years. As you go through the timeframes, the sectors or individual stocks will change in realtime. You’ll probably see a lot of red if you look at recent times, but if you go back five years, there will be a lot of green (those were some better times, weren’t they?).
Show Indices will toggle a ticker at the bottom with overall changes to the S&P, DOW, and NAS. With current times, I would probably recommend having this off if you don’t want to see the negatives constantly.
Any time when you want to refresh data, just tap on the button. It will fade in and out as it’s refreshing, and remain solid when it’s done. If at any time you need help while using the app, the “i” button will give you a help overlay, while also providing links to support and tutorials, and even the developer’s Facebook and Twitter.
Even though I did not have much interest in the stock market before, StockTouch is going to change that. I love having this app on my iPhone, and with the latest update, the app is now universal and has stunning Retina display graphics. It’s fairly intuitive and provides a great breadth of information.
If anything could make the app even better, it would probably be auto-refresh. Those that keep an eye on the markets all the time would probably appreciate such a feature, rather than having to remember to update constantly.
I highly recommend StockTouch if you are even the slightest bit interested in the stock market. Those that care about the stock market for business or personal reasons would also love this app. It’s just a great tool for watching over the markets, and easily puts Apple’s own Stocks app to shame.
This is $4.99 well spent (it’s universal too!) if the stock market matters at all to you.
