Tech.blog

For some months now, I’ve been using Bloomberg Mobile on my iPod Touch to keep myself updated on what’s happening to my stock portfolio. The thing I liked about Bloomberg is it allowed me to monitor stocks from almost any stock exchange in the world, like the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE). Since I live in the Philippines, adding stocks from the PSE was a huge plus.

Then just the other day, I read that Yahoo! Finance for Mobile for iPhone/iPod Touch was available at the App Store. So, I decided to give it a try and compare it with Bloomberg Mobile.

Adding stocks

Bloomberg Mobile "My Stocks" Screen

With Bloomberg Mobile, you just select the ‘My Stocks’ icon on the bottom of the screen and you’ll see a list of your stocks. The information on the two right-most columns can be changed so that you can view the last price traded, % change from previous close, the price you initially bought the stocks, profit and loss amount, current value, and stock position.

The prices shown on the left are in Philippine Peso. Very useful for me as I usually think in terms of PHP.

To rearrange, add or remove items, just select the Edit button. When you access the add new stock screen from the Edit screen, you can search for stocks either by company name or stock symbol. You can then enter the number of stocks that you have (stock position) as well as the price bought.

Yahoo Finance Mobile "Quotes" Screen

The Yahoo! Finance for Mobile for iPhone has a cooler interface when displaying stock information. Just select the Quotes button at the top of the screen and you’ll be presented with your list of stocks as well as currency exchange rates. You can even customize the view for each stock to include more information such as a mini-chart.

However, the downside for me is that stocks prices are displayed in USD. If there was an option to change how this information is displayed, I have not discovered it yet. I like how you could add currency exchange rates. Bloomberg Mobile has a feature that displays currency exchange rates but it is on a different screen and unfortunately, I could not add the Philippine Peso.

When rearranging items, Bloomberg Mobile allows you to simply drag the items so you can change the order of your stocks. With Yahoo! Finance Mobile, you have to hold down the item and when a pop-up menu appears, you can remove, resize or move the item. Selecting move, will enable small dots to appear on the different items. An instruction at the bottom of the screen tells you to touch a dot to move items. How touching the item will move it to another portion of your list, I haven’t figured it out yet.

Viewing Stock Information

Both applications give you the option to view stock charts and other information like stock movements for the day, the last month, the last six months, etc. Bloomberg Mobile conveniently shows you this information in one screen. With Yahoo! Finance Mobile, it spans three screens so you will have to page through the information before you find what you need.

Bloomberg Mobile and Yahoo! Finance Mobile both have delays in getting information from their respective servers. That’s not really a problem for me since I don’t have a wi-fi connection everywhere I go. All I need is keep updated once in a while. However, I do expect to see some information (i.e. the information from the last download)  if ever the application cannot establish a connection to the server. That is, information from the last download is cached on the device.

With Bloomberg, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I tried not to download data for a couple of days and some of the stock information still displayed. A message on the bottom of the screen even showed when — a date if it’s more than a day or the time if it’s within the day — the data was last downloaded. There are times though, that nothing is displayed at all and an error message at the bottom of the screen tells me that there is no internet connection.

However, with Yahoo! Finance Mobile, it does not show any information at all when you launch the application without an Internet connection. Not even the last stock price or last currency exchange rate is cached.

I’m not sure if it’s a glitch or it was behaving how it was supposed to, but when I launched Yahoo! Finance Mobile for the first time and added stocks that I want to monitor, no chart information was downloaded. Furthermore, it seemed that the stock price is not updated. I had expected that the data will at least provide information from the previous  trading day. But it didn’t.

Conclusion

Although, Yahoo! Finance Mobile offers a great (and cool) interface, it still needs a bit more tweaking in terms of how some of the information is presented and how users can arrange items. However, there is such great promise there. I’m sure an updated version of Yahoo! Finance Mobile is already in the works.

Bloomberg Mobile remains simple to use and gets the needed information to the user. I would love to see some of the UI from Yahoo! Finance Mobile on Bloomberg Mobile, though.