I tested the free features for the E*Trade Mobile Pro iPhone app in this video. The app itself is free to download, but you must have a E*Trade Pro account to use the majority of the features to trade, analyze stocks and the market, and manage your trading account. There are only 3 main features that are free: market overview with the major indicies (Dow Jones, NASDAQ, S&P 500), News, and customizable watchlists. These are 90{00d49d11e69c107fd0547ad1426c94743daa91813c9cad4d9ea0d389f8c38222} the same as the iPhone stocks app that comes standard with the iPhone and uses Yahoo! finance data. The market data are delayed for those without an E*Trade account.
1. Menu: Many functionalities to organize and manage your portfolio, analyze stocks and options to trade, and trade execution tools: Dashboard, Markets, News, Quotes, Accounts, Portfolios, Watch Lists, Trading, QuickTransfer, CNBC video, and more. Only the dashboard, news, and watchlist features are free. One of the unique features for E*Trade Pro users is the streaming CNBC videos that you can watch on your iPhone.
2. Markets Overview (on Dashboard): Shows the major market indices including the Dow Jones Industrial Average, NASDAQ, and S&P 500. Viewable in 2 different modes: chart mode with tabs to switch between the indices, and list mode that shows delayed market data for each of the indices.
3. News: The news shown on the Dashboard is general market news and can be expanded to show several pages of headlines, unlike the standard iPhone stock app that only shows 4 headlines. When viewing individual stocks, news is shown for that specific ticker. When a headline is clicked, the news article is shown in the E*Trade Mobile Pro app itself instead of opening in Safari. This is good in keeping you in the app instead of switching between E*Trade and Safari, especially if you are in a trade or about to make one.
4. Watchlists: Easy to add, arrange, and delete stocks from a default watchlist. To add more watchlists, you must have a E*Trade Pro account. A unique feature is the ability to add several tickers at once to the watchlist by separating tickers with commas when entering them into the list.
5. Ticker view: When you click on a stock ticker in the watchlist, you see a layout much like the Dashboard, but for the particular stock. The top shows the chart and can switch views to see the stock’s data such as current price, high, low, volume, etc. Below the chart/data box is the news box that shows several of the latest headlines related to this particular stock. When rotated to landscape mode, the chart becomes a full-screen chart. However, the chart is a basic line chart with no options to customize anything other than whether you want to see 1-day’s worth of data, 1-week, 1-month, 3-months, or 1-year.
Unless you have an E*Trade Pro account to access the advanced features, the free features with this app is very basic and not necessary when you already have the standard iPhone stock app. However, the advanced features are very complete, almost like you’re trading from your laptop or desktop computer. I will do a view review of the E*Trade Pro app advanced features for E*Trade users in the next post. The only other brokerage iPhone mobile app that gives you even more ability to trade on your phone is probably the thinkorswim iSwim for iPhone and thinkorswim mobile for Android.
