Charles Schwab doesn’t have an Android app, a Blackberry app, or even an iPhone app. Many brokerages are in the same boat, or if they do have a mobile app it is only on the iPhone. Starting later today, brokerage customers of Schwab, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and more than 60 other brokerages will be able to track their portfolios on new mobile Android and Blackberry apps from Wikinvest. Directions for downloading the mobile apps can be found here.
While about half of the brokerages Wikinvest suports have iPhone apps, only about 20 percent have Android or Blackberry apps. There are so many mobile app platforms that it is difficult for the brokerages to support them all. Wikinvest hopes to fill that gap with these apps.
One limitation of the apps is that they are view-only apps. You can track your portfolios across multiple brokerage accounts, but can’t trade from the app. Still, for most people, they just want that little ego boost (or crush, depending on teh direction of the market) every day. Wikinvest’s iPhone app, which launched in August, is currently one of the top 10 finance apps in the App Store, and accounts for a whopping two thirds of Wikinvest’s sign-ups.
Wikinvest is currently tracking $16 billion in assets, up from $1 billion five months ago. Those assets are spread across 62,000 Wikinvest members who track their portfolios, with half on the iPhone. Of those users, 65 percent are active at least once a month. They average 167 pageviews and log about 15 hours a month. People have always been addicted to checking their stocks, and now Wikinvest is riding that wave with its mobile apps.
Wikinvest is just as it sounds; a wiki for investing. The company seeks to take advantage of the large numbers of investors and investing savvy people who are looking to the web to get better trading tips. Like most wikis, Wikinvest will face a few problems including spammed/tampered entries, lack of incentive to create content and the dubious authority of users generating content. These problems exist for Wikipedia as well, yet Wikipedia continues to have as...
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