Stock/ share price monitoring is one of the most important aspects in investing and trading. You do not not want to buy a stock and then forget it about it totally. This is a dangerous move as you may be shocked by how low the price has fallen over the period that you are away. That was what happened to me at one stage of my investing journey where I became so demoralised when everything was falling that I decided to just stop monitoring the share prices. Then, the stocks continue to plunge and I lost the chance to cut my losses.
In this article, I am sharing the 2 apps that I use to monitor share prices on my phone and laptop.
The stock monitoring app that I am using for my phone is Investing.com
Prior to using this app, I was using the Reuters app but it was very UK centric and because Reuters is a news agency, I feel that the app is more geared towards providing news than stock monitoring. I like investing.com for the watchlist function, real-time stock prices and the ability to turn on pre-market and after-hours stock prices. I find the pre-market prices very useful as it is a pretty good indicator of where the market is heading to when the market opens. Investing.com also provides many financial news articles (some paid) related to the stocks on my watchlist.
The stock monitoring app that I am using for my computer/ laptop is Yahoo Finance.
As the screen is larger, I am able to add in more fields in my stock watchlist, such as the 52-week range, day range, P/E, Volume…etc, so I can view all these statistics at one glance. As I update my investment records (excel spreadsheet) after each trade, I will use Yahoo Finance to import the share prices into a .csv format file and then copy and paste the share prices into my spreadsheet so that I can track the profits/ loss of each stock in my portfolio.
The above 2 apps are crucial to my investing/ trading journey as the investing platforms that I am using (DBS Vickers & Interactive Brokers) do not provide real-time stock prices. Real-time prices are important as the prices can fluctuate a lot in a short period, especially in the US market with large volume of shares are transacted every second.
I hope this article gives you some insight and is useful to you in your investing journey. This is an important first step that you must execute before starting your investing journey. For myself, I have spent a few weeks monitoring the stock prices before I bought my first stock, as I get a better sensing of how the price has changed and I only buy when I am comfortable with the price.
Learning Investment With Jason Cai 