Filed under: Internet Tools, iPhone
Fidelity Market Monitor for the iPhone
I'm going to honest with you, dear reader, I know next to nothing about stocks, bonds, or mutual funds. This blogger's little mind just can't wrap itself around financial matters, but our friend's at Fidelity Investments make it their business to help fools like me. Today, Fidelity has launched the Fidelity Market Monitor for the iPhone (and your iPod touch too!).The Market Monitor is a web app that lets you track 25 stocks or mutual funds, gives you access to charts, stories about those stocks on Fidelity.com, and the ability to click a link and call Fidelity (in case you have a hot stock tip you must act on right away).
This differs from the iPhone's stock widget in both the source of the stock information, and the added bonus of links to related Fidelity news posts. Does that make it better than the Stock widgt? That's up to you to decide, I'm too busy gathering some money to buy a bridge in Brooklyn from this nice guy I know.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
R_K said 8:01AM on 11-16-2007
I don't get it why would developers put messages like "The Fidelity Market Monitor iPhone Application will only work on an Apple iPhone/iPod Touch" if at the end both Macs and iPhone/iPod Touch use WebKit browser?? Talk about web separation...
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Garrick said 8:31AM on 11-16-2007
Just tried on my iPhone, site appears to be down.
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Peter Cook said 8:31AM on 11-16-2007
It could also be noted that they have a pretty good Desktop Widget: http://personal.fidelity.com/misc/buffers/labs/index.shtml
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Frank Furter said 8:33AM on 11-16-2007
Yeah - great link. I (mistakenly) entered the URL without the index.php file, says site is broken (side note - is this really so hard to correct, web people? No, it's not).
After I re-entered the URL as you gave it, the screen went black, put some type of progress bar up that never got past about 75%.
Thanks for killing 5 minutes of my day. (Wouldn't this article almost be considered advertising, anyway?) Sheesh......
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dale said 8:39AM on 11-16-2007
Nice work, loaded pretty quickly on my iPhone over edge, better on wifi. I've been a user of their os x widget for a while, nice to see this ported to iPhone. Pretty neat how they integrated the phone numbers in there. I only wish I could login to my account and see my own watchlist, balances, etc.
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DistortedLoop said 8:44AM on 11-16-2007
I'm not quite a daytrader, but I do trade intraday and watch the market almost daily. On the iPhone, it's just a pain in the butt. EDGE is slow, and even mobile versions of broker sites are kinky on the iPhone's interface. With the lack of java apps and flash support, getting real time or streaming quotes just isn't going to happen on the iPhone.
The problem for an "active" trader with both the iPhone's built-in widget, or any other publicly accessible site is that the quotes are 20 minutes delayed, which is an eternity behind the times in a volatile market. Look at the intra-day charts of AAPL the last week and look how hard it falls the last twenty minutes most days. Someone relying on these widgets wouldn't know the carnage was there until the market had closed.
For the serious investor/trader, the stock widgets are just a toy, and for those like you Scott (don't understand or follow the market), an interesting oddity at best, and probably a waste of a widget place holder on the iPhone's home screen.
One killer app for me on the iPhone would be a site that offers real time quotes over EDGE that the iPhone can read. Anyone's broker do that yet?
Google's tried in the past to argue with the Stock Exchanges that they should be able to offer them up on Google finance, but as they're a premium product/service, that's not likely to happen any time soon.
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Lupe said 9:12AM on 11-16-2007
Iphone is a great product. But, it needs 203 years more to be more "mature" imo.
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Mobilehavoc said 11:35AM on 11-16-2007
Tried it out and didn't really see any value over the native Stocks widget..at least for me.
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Adam T. said 1:34PM on 11-16-2007
One thing I love about Yahoo's stock application is that it has a symbol for the 10-year treasury bond, which is huge in my industry, mortgages. Try searching for ^TNX on this thing and it just scratches its head, confused.
The interface looks pretty spiffy, though.
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