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Gone are the days where you had to manage elaborate spreadsheets to track your investment portfolio. Today, you can trade stocks from desktop or mobile apps, gather all your investments in a single place, watch their progress and sell on your own when it’s time.
Even better, there are many options for which app to choose. I’ve gathered a list of the best stock trading apps and explain which apps are the ideal fit for different types of investors.
What is a Stock Tracking App?
A stock tracking app allows you to monitor stocks you’ve purchased as well as others you are interested in following. Most of the time, but not always, these apps are also stock trading apps.
Stock trading apps work as brokers that let you buy and sell stocks. They also act as useful stock news apps, investment research software and stock analysis apps.
The features of stock tracking apps vary, so it’s important to choose one that has the tools you need.
Best Stock Tracking Apps at a Glance
The best stock tracking app for you isn’t necessarily the perfect app for someone else. Your best choice is likely one of the following:
- Best app for portfolio analysis: Personal Capital
- Best stock tracking app for Windows and Mac: Stock Rover
- Best for personal finance oriented investors: M1 Finance
- Best stock tracking app for iPhone: SoFi: (iOS), Android
- Best website to view stocks: Webull
- Best for sophisticated investors: TradeStation
- Best for buy-and-hold investors: Motley Fool Stock Advisor
- Bonus: Best stock tracking app to learn personal finance: AskFinny
While one of the stock trading apps above likely suits your needs, there are more apps worth looking into, such as:
- Yahoo! Finance
- Seeking Alpha
- StockTwits
- E-Trade
- TDAmeritrade
- Robinhood
Let’s look deeper into the top picks and the pros and cons of each.
1. Personal Capital: Best Stock Tracking App for Ongoing Portfolio Management
- Available via desktop, Apple iOS and Android App on Google Play.
- Sign up here
Personal Capital has almost two million users. Some of those use the Free Financial Dashboard version, while others use the Wealth Management service.
The Free Financial Dashboard makes it easy for people to add all their financial accounts in one place, including credit cards, savings, checking, loans, and tax-advantaged investment accounts.
It also provides an investment tool that makes recommendations for adjusting your portfolio to improve your investment performance.
The Wealth Management plan is preferred by those who want more of a full investment service. This service provides both automated tools and human management. After you enter your risk tolerance, goals, time frame, and personal preferences, Personal Capital creates a recommended portfolio.
The portfolios are diversified across multiple asset classes and rebalanced when necessary. The six asset classes include:
- U.S. stocks
- International stocks
- U.S. bonds
- International bonds
- Alternative investments
- Cash
Customers have the option to incorporate socially responsible investing (SRI) into their investments as well, meaning you can choose to invest only in companies that have positive environmental and social impacts.
Conveniently, Personal Capital’s financial advisors are available 24/7 by phone, live chat, email, or web conference.
Each user has two dedicated financial advisors to help make various financial decisions, from retirement planning to college savings to stock options and more.
Note that the Wealth Management plan has a minimum initial investment of $100,000 or $200,000 if you want financial advisors. There are extra benefits for people who invest over $1 million.
I’m not alone thinking this is a top app for ongoing portfolio management. BrokerChooser recommends this as their top portfolio tracking app as well.
- Personal Capital is a free app that makes it easy to track your net worth.
- You can link it to your bank and investing accounts, credit cards and more to see a single view of useful information and data, including your net worth.
- Get a free $20 Amazon gift card when you sign up and link one or more investment accounts worth at least $1,000!
2. Stock Rover: Best Stock Tracking App for Windows and Mac
- Available via desktop, mobile and tablet
- Sign up here
Stock Rover helps you keep tabs on your portfolio with detailed performance information, email performance reports, in-depth portfolio analysis tools, correlation tools, trade planning and re-balancing facilities.
The web-based applet works well as a stock tracking app for Windows, but also functions on Mac, mobile and tablets as well.
You can subscribe to this service for a number of applications, but it provides a comprehensive alerting facility, allowing you to find out immediately when something happens that you need to know.
The stock screener can also find instances where companies trade below their perceived fair value, signaling opportunities to buy stocks with a built-in margin of safety.
Stock Rover’s “Brokerage Connect” provides an investor with a read-only data feed of their portfolio holdings, providing you a comprehensive view of your portfolios spread across numerous investment accounts.
When you connect your Stock Rover account to your brokerage accounts, details for each portfolio get delivered to Stock Rover for analytics and tracking purposes.
Consider signing up for Stock Rover with a free 14-day trial. From there, you can decide if you’d like to upgrade to service’s premium plans for more robust tracking and analysis.
3. M1 Finance: Best Stock Tracking App (Android)
- Available via desktop, Apple iOS and Android App on Google Play.
- Sign up here
M1 Finance is known for requiring no minimum balance to open an account, no broker fees, and no charge on commissions. The app is great both for investors who want experts to make all their stock decisions and those who want to create a fully custom portfolio.
One option is to pick one of the 80 portfolio options created by experts, for example one that invests in niches like death care stocks or target date retirement funds. Alternatively, you can have complete control and choose any individual stocks or ETFs you want to buy.
Providing even more flexibility, you can purchase fractional shares, meaning you can buy a portion of a share. This allows you to have 100% of your money invested at all times. You won’t have a personal advisor, but the app will provide you with useful tips and tools.
M1 Finance isn’t designed for day traders. It works best for people looking to build long-term wealth. Several types of investment accounts are available, such as a taxable account, joint account, trust, IRA, and savings account.
You can move money easily between your accounts. The app doesn’t have options, mutual funds, or cryptocurrency investing capabilities.
Read more in our M1 Finance review.
4. SoFi: Best Stock Tracking App (iPhone)
SoFi has many of the same benefits as M1 Finance, such as no minimum investment to open an account and the ability to seamlessly move money between investment accounts.
The app offers a robust user experience on iPhones (and Androids) for tracking stocks because the service provides trading capabilities to active and passive traders alike. The watchlists provide real-time data for you to follow along as your stocks move in price.
Users can invest actively and have full control over the stocks and funds in their portfolio or they can invest more passively by choosing a pre-built portfolio based on their level of risk aversion and financial status.
Real people, not robots, create the pre-build portfolios. SoFi also allows fractional sharing, which they call “stock bits.”
SoFi doesn’t offer stock options trading or tax-loss harvesting. However, it does allow you to invest in cryptocurrency, which isn’t available by all competitors.
You can use tools to see your money’s potential growth and have access to Certified Financial Planners if you have further questions.
5. Webull: Best App for Watching Stock Market Activity
- Available via desktop, Apple iOS and Android App on Google Play.
- Sign up here
Webull is an amazing option for intermediate to advanced investors, especially those who actively trade. There is no account minimum and stock trading is free.
The app provides live market data and you can customize your homepage to show what countries and regions you’re most interested in and the stocks you’re tracking.
Users have access to extensive charting, advanced orders, technical indicators, and advanced quotes. Unlike many other apps, Webull allows options trading (free!) as well as cryptocurrency trading.
Currently, Webull has a partnership with Nasdaq that gives clients premier level two market data. After a three-month free trial, Level 2 Advance costs $1.99 per month and provides comprehensive data.
This service allows you access to the complete depth-of-book with Nasdaq’s best 30+ offers and bids so you can see orders being placed in real time. You can access the book by individual orders or price levels.
You can also access the Net Order Imbalance Indicator (NOII) data before the official market open and close.
Webull allows for real-time data tracking and price movements. Because of its free service offering, we recommend Webull as the best app for watching stock market activity for any level of investor. They even offer free stocks for signing up.
Learn more about the app in our Webull review.
6. TradeStation: Best Stock Tracking App for PC
- Available via desktop, Apple iOS and Android App on Google Play.
- Sign up here
TradeStation includes a wide variety of trading options, such as:
- Stocks (including penny stocks)
- Options
- Futures
- Futures options
- Mutual funds (with broker assistance)
- Bonds (with broker assistance)
- Cryptocurrency on TradeStation Crypto (not fully integrated)
On your desktop, users have access to many powerful tools. There are stock and ETF screeners, such as RadarScreen. RadarScreen allows you to build a list (max 2,000 stocks) to monitor in real time, based on over 180 fundamental and technical criteria.
TradeStation has advanced charting abilities and trading simulators, including backtesting strategies from a large historical database. This app is best for intermediate to advanced traders.
The service’s robust desktop platform makes it the best stock tracking app for PCs.
7. Motley Fool Stock Advisor: Best Stock Tracking App for Long-Term Investors
- Available: Sign up here
- Price: $99/year
Simply put, Motley Fool’s signature product, Stock Advisor, aims to provide you one thing: top stock picks for market-beating stocks from the site’s co-founders. The service espouses my favorite, plain vanilla trading style: buy-and-hold.
What it also does is continue to track their recommendations across time and provides you with a community of engaged investors keen on earning outsized returns.
This makes it a great stock tracking app to include on this list because it not only follows stock price movements, it provides engaged commentary from the service and investors themselves.
The options listed above provide that real-time insight and analytics, but this provides that more valuable insight: due diligence and depth.
Not discounting the above for their valuable data-driven tracking abilities, but this stock advice service and tracking app provides qualitative and quantitative features for tracking your stocks.
Likely of little interest to many day traders, this long-term orientation, when invested in the right stocks, can produce exciting longer-term returns that outperform several trading strategies. It does so with little active portfolio management beyond doing your research upfront.
The company also offers a growth stock oriented service, called Motley Fool Rule Breakers. Of the two, Stock Advisor remains my pick because it doesn’t go for moonshots, just steady outperformers.
In fact, the investment newsletter sends recommendations for “Steady Eddies” and potential high-flying stocks the service believes provide financially sound fundamentals.
Preferring to stick with companies that outperform steadily over time, Stock Advisor offers stock picks with investment rationales, research and information to inform you of your investments.
Motley Fool Stock Advisor provides a list of five stocks they believe deserving of your money today. Stock Advisor also lists "Starter Stocks" they believe should serve as a portfolio's foundation.
8. AskFinny: Best Stock Tracking App to Learn Personal Finance
- Available via desktop and mobile
- Sign up here
Finny provides proprietary investing tools, stock and fund “X-ray” analyses and insights to your bull and bear investing theses. These can be useful for tracking stocks and deciding which ones make sense to buy and sell.
The service provides objective points of view on any investment you want to research by applying rules-based analysis to stocks, ETFs and mutual funds.
When looking into the respective cases for and against buying a stock, the company offers you something called the “Finny Score” to balance out your arguments and research. Further, you can compare a series of investments for pertinent information to guide your decision-making.
Use the company’s stock screener to uncover investment opportunities and read the company’s investment newsletter to be in-the-know on the latest market news and stock developments.
Best Portfolio Management Apps
Investing in stocks is one of the best ways to secure future wealth and choosing a stock tracking app is an important step in that process. Whether you use an Android, iPhone, or prefer a desktop, there is a stock tracking app for you.
Consider all the analytics tools you may want to use when choosing a stock app. For some people, one app fulfills all their investment tracking needs, while other people use multiple investment apps. Once you choose a stock trading app, you can focus on making your investment portfolio grow.
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