The folks at Visible Market invited me to try their new app called StockTouch, available for $4.99 in the Apple App Store. Its unique premise is that it “brings the power of data visualization and financial information together.”
I myself use E-Trade not only to buy, but for research. E-Trade gets the job done for the latter point, but StockTouch takes it to the next level.
From its graphic interface, you can see how the top 100 US and Global companies are doing in nine sectors (e.g. health, tech, etc.) over any given period of time (e.g. one day to five years).
I tested the app on an iPod Touch. I venture to guess that the interface would be better had I used an iPad, which I don’t own. For example, the main screen shows all nine sectors. After you tap on one of the sectors, that sector itself takes up the whole screen, but to show all of the companies at once (represented by little rectangles), each one is very small. If you have larger fingers or don’t have a stylus, you may find it hard to choose the company you want.
Still, the display is what makes StockTouch a keeper. I can’t think of a better way to quickly see how a stock is doing in the market. The color-coded system (green=gains, red=losses) shows you how a stock is doing based on its price, volume, against the S&P 500 or against its peers.
As weird as this sounds, I actually felt smarter using the app. It’s wonderful to be able to interpolate and even extrapolate trends in a stock’s performance. Plus, you can get all the latest news about the stock.
One other thing: you can also mark stocks as favorites, so that they are highlighted in each sector. In a future update, I’m hoping that you can just view all your favorites together at once.
Here’s a video from the StockTouch website: