The apps that mean business
Financial information
Bloomberg has the best financial information on the iPhone by a mile (free). For those in the UK, you might also want to add Shareprice (free, pictured above), which gives you real-time live streaming level one market prices for the LSE. MarketWatch from Dow Jones (free) is also good, while Thomson Reuters (free) is trusted and reliable. Morningstar and Forbes also have apps. For keeping tabs on your positions, Apple’s Stocks app (which comes loaded on the phone, and is therefore free) is probably the most reliable. For those involved in commodities trading, Black Gold, which offers oil, gas and gold price tracking (free) is handy. And for those moments when you get bored, check out Inside Trader (£0.59), a trading game where you can test your instincts for fun.
Mobile Trading
The big spread betting and forex trading companies are still getting into the iPhone, but City Index does offer an app, with a massive amount of functionality (free to those with an account). The same deal is available for forex traders with a GFT account – their app is called DealBook (pictured). Other useful apps include Forex On the Go, expensive at £34.99, but the functionality is impressive, even allowing you to calculate Fibonacci retracements. Technical analysis fiends might also like Call/Put (free), which allows you to perform Black-Scholes analysis of European call and put options and to calculate Delta, Gamma and so on. 1337Stocks (£5.99) is a powerful charting tool that includes indicators such as stochastics, histogrammes and MACD. If you need help calculating positions, then Risk Manager (free) helps to calculate risks and rewards.
Tools
Sorting out your expenses is a fiddly and time-consuming chore, but Nexonia’s Expenses app (£8.99) takes out some of the pain. The app allows you to create expenses reports, and even to use the iPhone camera to photograph them before you submit them, and you can send a PDF to your email. Users might also be tempted to download Tipping Point, which helps you calculate tips in restaurants when a number of people are paying (£0.59). Cardreader (£3.49) takes photos of business cards, then inserts new contacts into your address book. The way it works is that your phone sends the info to the company, who take it off the card, input it and feed it back to you, so mistakes ought not to occur. The process takes on average just a couple of hours, and users say that they only have to change the odd “I” to an “L” (£8.99).