Software & Service Reviews | May 17, 2010 | 2 Comments

MarketScan for iPad Reviewed

Nice, Clean, Simple App

As the first part of my financial ipad app review series, I will take a look at MarketScan. This was actually the first financial app that I bought for my iPad. It is currently $3.99 in the app store, which is slightly lower than some other financial apps.

Quick Overview

If you’re looking for a simple app that will let you follow a stock through multiple data sources, like Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, etc, then MarketScan might be for you. It’s inexpensive and not cluttered up with a lot of data.

I like it as a quick research tool.

Financial Site Browser

When you start up MarketScan, the first of two tabs that’s activated is the “Sites” tab. This allows you to 1-click navigate to any financial sites setup in the app.

Initially, the app comes with 8 sites ready to go: Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, MSN Money, CNBC, MarketWatch, Bloomberg, NYSE, and NASDAQ.

As you can see in the picture, Financial Rebel is also in that list and on top. MarketScan gives you the ability to add your own sites and to order them how you like.

You can also delete sites. So, for example, if you’d rather not have MSN Money in your list, just a quick swipe and it’s gone.

Sure, you could fire up Safari, go to your bookmarks and navigate to your favorite sites that way, but this is easier. By the way, you can open up any of these sites in Safari from  the app. You can also copy links, email links and display the website full screen.

Securities Browser

The second tab in MarketScan is where the app really becomes helpful. When you click on the “Securities” tab, you’ll see a listing of all the ticker symbols you’re following.

The app comes with some securities already setup, such as: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon and Netflix. Again, you can remove these if you want and add your own.

I want to point out two things from my screenshot. First, there are site buttons on the bottom of the app screen (black bar area). When you click these, the app takes you directly to the ticker symbol’s page on that site.

For example, if you were to have AAPL (Apple) selected and then were to click on the Yahoo Finance button, you’d go right to AAPL’s stock page on Yahoo Finance.

If you click the “More” button on the bottom of the app, you get a screen popup (as shown in the picture) that lists more sites. And you can even add your own sites here too.

You are not limited to just stock ticker symbols. You can follow anything with a symbol. Some items use the “^” symbol, like the ^DJI. For these, you’d replace “^” with “%5E”—so ^DJI becomes %5EDJI. Some examples are: Dow Jones Industrial Average (%5EDJI), Russell 2000 (%5ERUT), S&P 500 (%5EGSPC) and NASDAQ Composite (%5EIXIC).

MarketScan has many sites already setup for you, such as: Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, MSN Money, StockTwits, YCharts, CNBC, Bloomberg and the Financial Times.

While it’s a little hard to see in this picture, the site buttons are all in the black bar on the bottom of the app. This is just a reduced-sized screen shot. In the actual app, you can see them clearly.

If I had one gripe with this app it’s that I can’t order the security sites. For example, I don’t usually go to MSN Money for stock information, so this button is useless to me. I’d much rather replace it with Stock Charts or FinViz. It’s a minor issue, but I felt I should point this out.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I like MarketScan. It’s a very clean app without lots of clutter. While I could use Safari to accomplish the same thing, it would be far more time consuming—selecting a site from bookmarks, going to the site, entering the stock symbol and pulling up the data.

For $3.99, I didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. I consume a lot of information daily in the financial arena and time is money. I find that this app is good for quick initial research. One idea for the developer would be to pull data from multiple sources into one window.

What are your thoughts about MarketScan? Do you think it’s a good app? What are some options you think this app creator should develop? Even if you don’t have an iPad, I’d love to hear what you think about apps like this.