Monitoring your portfolio is now easier than ever. “Observing, managing, and reviewing investments is now, for the first time ever, being done while in line for coffee, in a cab, or walking a dog,” says Hart Lambur, co-founder of Openfolio. “Twenty years ago, if you wanted to start investing, you may have called a full-service broker who charged outrageous fees just to make a trade. Now, discount brokerages and do-it-yourself models allow regular people to make their own trades for a fraction of that cost – and user friendly investing apps allow anyone with Wi-Fi and a bank account to start investing.” Since the advent of the iPad and the Apple Watch, portfolio apps have been modified to fit mobile platforms, with the added bonus that apps have lower fees than actual portfolio managers and the capacity to keep investors constantly informed. Thanks to apps, everyone can be an investor—and they don’t have to modify their lifestyle to do it. As Raul Moreno, co-founder and CEO of iBillionaire, notes: “It’s not realistic for a financial advisor, retail investor, or anyone interested in the stock market to be glued to the television, computer, or terminal all day, watching stock prices and managing investments…”Investing is an inherently fast-paced, on-the-go industry, rendering it an especially good fit for mobile technology.”
App users have control over their investments, but as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility, and some expert investors are concerned that some investment apps make it too easy to trade on impulse, tempting investors to make decisions based on market volatility. Investors need to take advantage of the convenience of mobile investment apps without being tempted into risky financial behavior, such as trading too frequently and making important changes rashly. Impulse trading is very dangerous and not at all uncommon. One combatant to impulse trading is Telezio LLC’s stock trading app, EyeOnMyStocks.
EyeOnMyStocks is a free iOS app that helps investors track their portfolio in a novel way. Users enter their stocks into the app & set high/low price thresholds. When a stock crosses the threshold price, the user receives a notification. These thresholds, updated in real time, eliminate the need to manually monitor price history to see whether or not your stock is climbing or falling. The goal is to keep an eye on the portfolio so users don’t need to constantly be glued to a screen. The developers deliberately excluded trading functionality in the app so that users don’t make rash decisions based on the information. You won’t be buying or selling stocks on this app, but you will get essential information as it becomes available. So if you’re in line for coffee and you receive a notification that your stock price fell beneath the threshold, don’t jump out of line just yet, because it’s quite possible that by the time you get to the door to leave, you’ll receive another notification that your stock price rose above the threshold again. Additional valuable services provided by this app, free of charge, are some pertinent news items that impinge on your stocks’ prices. Say Facebook decided to start charging for their services– this is information that could directly affect shareholders, so when you get news such as this, you’ll be able to make a decision on whether or not you need to take action on your Facebook stock. Any important development or news concerning the company, its release of earnings report, announced upgrades or downgrades by analysts, reminders about upcoming earnings reports and highly important stock market related news and events that may directly affect the stocks in the user’s portfolio will be sent directly to your watch and or phone.
When you’ll actually receive these updates depends on the settings that you choose. You can choose to receive price updates when the market opens or closes, or you can set a custom time, say 3:00pm every day. High value news will be sent out as it becomes available. In my opinion, anyone with an iPhone, iPod Touch, and/or Apple Watch who’d like to be able to step away from that computer screen and monitor their stocks on-the-go would certainly find a gem with portfolio monitor, EyeOnMyStocks.
EyeOnMyStocks really shines on the Apple Watch, allowing you to send notifications directly to your watch whenever you’re not looking at your phone. Just like on the iPhone app, it stays out of your way until thresholds are met, or until an event of high importance occurs– it’s a pretty unobtrusive way to keep track of your stocks. When you receive information from EyeOnMyStocks, you can choose to take action through your broker, or do it yourself. This way, when your broker makes an investment decision, you’ll be aware of the information that he used to make said decision, the same is the case if you use “set it and forget it services”. If you, yourself are an investor, then you’ll find these notifications useful in helping you to see how your stock behaves in the market. This app can be downloaded for free from the app store here with no registration required and there are absolutely no in app purchases.
Monitoring your portfolio on-the-go is arguably a necessity for today’s modern investors. Mobile investment apps are quite possibly a decided advantage of millennials over older generations of investors, but it all depends on how you use what you have. EyeOnMyStocks gives you the tools that you need in order to make an investment decision, while eliminating the possibility of impulse trading though the app. An informed investor has clear advantages over an uninformed investor; namely that they are much less likely to make impulsive trading decisions. Whether novice or expert investor, you’ll find EyeOnMyStocks to be a gem.
