Online investment service Scottrade lets you buy and sell stocks, bonds, and other financial products or research investments without the help of a stock broker. Now the company also offers an Android app that lets you do all of that on the go.

The free Scottrade app for Android joins the company’s apps for iPhone and BlackBerry.

Even without a Scottrade account you can use the app to view market updates, get stock quotes, or read the latest financial news. You can view detailed charts with views for the past day, 5 days, 6 months, 1 year, or 5 years.

If you have an account with the online brokerage you can also monitor your investments and buy or sell stocks directly from your phone. You can also set up alerts.

Scottrade charges $7 per trade, so the app isn’t entirely free to use. But you pay the same price for each transaction whether you’re using the mobile app or the website.

If you’re a BlackBerry user that needs constant updates on your stock portfolio, BerryBlowApps has developed an app for you: Stocks+.

Stocks+ is different than other finance-based apps for BlackBerry, as it comes with the ability to display your stocks on your home screen. As the app updates in the background, the stock information on your wallpaper changes, so you always have up-to-date information right in front of you.

You can specify pop-up, sound, LED, and vibration alerts for a change in stock value, the difference between average of the day and current value, and the difference between 52 week average and current value (as a percentage). You can also backup and restore your stocks and alerts settings.

The app was recently updated to version 1.3, which brought company-related news and updates. It also came with the ability to sort the order of your stocks, set your background photo within the app, and backup to an SDCard.

You can download Stocks+ for $4.99 or try it out the free demo version first.

via CrackBerry

Online investment firm E*Trade recently launched an Android app to go with the company’s iOS and BlackBerry apps. I wanted to check it out, but I don’t actually use E*Trade to manage my investments. I use Scottrade, which doesn’t offer mobile apps (instead relying on a mobile web site). But while that means I can’t buy and sell stocks using a mobile app, it doesn’t mean I can’t keep on top of my investments.

While searching for a Scottrade app, I came across a mobile app called Wikinvest Portfolio, which is available for Android and iOS. The app is tied to a web-based service called, you guessed it, Wikinvest.

You can link Wikinvest with your brokerage. It supports more than 60 different brokerages including Scottrade, E*Trade, Schwab, Fidelity, and TD Ameritrade, allowing you to see the latest prices for all the stocks in your portfolio. You can also click the News tab to see the latest business news or the Markets tab to see the latest on the US and international markets.

Things get even more interesting when you search for a quote or tap on a stock in your portfolio. Wikinvest brings up information about the stock’s recent performance, news headlines, and other details about the company. The news tab shows you the latest business news about the company. And the Analysis tab provides Bullish and Bearish opinions from the Wikinvest community.

Unfortunately some of the analysis appears to be woefully out of date, but the stock prices and statistics all appear to be accurate. Wikinvest also powers the financial data at NPR.org and Forbes.com.

The Wikinvest apps are available as free downloads from the Android Market and iTunes App Store.

Yahoo has launched a mobile Yahoo Finance app for Google Android. Like similar apps from Google, Aol, and Bloomberg, the Yahoo Finance app lets you view near real-time stock quotes and news as well as manage your portfolio.

You can also create customized stock watch lists and view videos from the Yahoo Finance Tech Ticker site — although the streaming video quality was pretty awful in my tests, even over WiFi.

Scan to download

Still, the video aspect helps set the Yahoo Finance app apart from the competition, as does the instant search results view in the Quotes section. As you start to type a company name or ticker symbol, results will appear instantaneously. As you continue typing, the results are refined until you find the company you’re looking for. You can click the plus button next to any search result to add it to your watch list.

Yahoo Finance is certainly one of the most attractive finance apps I’ve seen for Android so far, and it’s probably a great app to have if you’re already a Yahoo Finance user. On the other hand, stock quotes are apparently delayed by 15 minutes, which is less than ideal.

Yahoo Finance is available as a free download from the Android Market. The app is only available in the US for now, but international versions are on their way.

Bloomberg has launched an Android app for tracking stock quotes, keeping up on business news, and managing stock portfolios.

You can filter the news by region, industry, or popularity. There’s also a Home Screen widget that you can use to see either a snapshot of your stock portfolio or the latest business news.

Scan to download

There’s a Markets tab that lets you see the updates to equity indices, commodities, bonds, and currencies at a glance and a stock finder that gives you detailed information about a company including the latest and historical stock prices as well as news about that company.

There are other finance apps in the Android Market, including Google Finance and Aol’s DailyFinance app, but the Bloomberg app offers more features than just about any other finance app for Android.

The Bloomberg app is available as a free download from the Android Market.

Bloomberg also offers mobile apps for iOS, BlackBerry, and Symbian.

via Android Guys

Google Finance is a nifty web-based set of tools for tracing stock prices, researching companies, reading business news, or keeping up to date on your personal portfolio. Unfortunately, the mobile version of the web site left a bit to be desired. This week Google revamped the mobile version of Google Finance so that it’s almost as good as the desktop version.

No when you visit Google Finance on a mobile phone you can click the Markets, Portfolio, or News tab to get an overview of the general markets, your personal stocks, or market news. You can also look up any company by entering its name or stock ticker in the “quote” box.

The Portfolio tab lets you create, delete, or edit your portfolios, view transactions, or sort your stocks by the biggest movers.

Overall the new mobile web page for Google Finance offers pretty much the same experience as the free Google Finance app for Android devices. And it has the same limitation: While you can view info about individual stocks in your portfolio, it doesn’t show you how much your entire portfolio is up or down each day. That’s something that makes the desktop version of Google Finance much more useful if you want to be able to tell if your investments are up 2% or down 50% today.

AOL has launched two new apps for Android. The first is simply called AOL, and it’s basically a portal to some of AOL’s mobile web sites as well as download links for other AOL apps including the mobile Engadget app and the AOL Lifestream app which is actually a pretty decent tool for keeping track of Facebook, Twitter, and other social network streams.

The News portion of the AOL app is probably the most useful, if you’re looking for general interest news. The ability to change the background is probably the least useful, since you basically get to change the color or shape of those splotches in the top left and bottom right corners. That’s it.

The AOL DailyFinance app, on the other hand, is actually pretty awesome. It offers far more functionality than the Google Finance app which is also available as a free download from the Android Market. the home screen shows you an overview of US and global markets. You can also see a list of the day’s movers, see the latest headlines from DailyFinance.com, and login to see your portfolio watchlist if you have an AOL account — although you don’t need one to use the rest of the app’s features.

The final tab is labeled “get quotes,” and it lets you look up information by a company or fund name or stock symbol. When you click on the results you can see the latest prices, how much the stock went up or down that day, as well as a ton of other information. You can also click the news tab to see recent stories related to that item, or the chart tab to plot it’s progress on a… well, chart.