Is ShareInvestor for iPhone Singapore’s best stock-tracker?

We were alerted to a new app that tracks Singapore’s securities markets by Alvin Lai, one of the developers who worked on it. The free app, ShareInvestor, is published by the website of the same name. There are versions for iPhone, Ipod Touch and Android.

In a market with high smartphone penetration like Singapore, a decent Android or iPhone app makes sense. The app has proven popular with the Apple crowd — it was ranked ninth in the Singapore App Store when we checked yesterday.

I pay for ShareInvestor’s extra features on its website and I’m also a dabbler in the local stock market, so I decided to give the iPhone app a go. Here’s the review.

The Good

Excellent news features – If ShareInvestor does one thing well, it’s getting you news on Singapore-listed companies. Three news feeds makes it a very comprehensive way to keep up with market-moving news. ShareInvestor gives you a Dow Jones feed filtered for Singapore market news, a feed from the Business Times (which, like ShareInvestor, belongs to the conglomerate Singapore Press Holdings) and something called ShareInvestor Express, which looks like cut-and-pasted filings from SGX.

Why not just use RSS feeds, you ask? Because the Business Times feed is behind a paywall, the Dow Jones feed for Singapore-specific market news is a subscription-only service, and SGX has a horrible website that makes it almost impossible to quickly and easily get notified about the day’s new filings.

Unique fundamentals filter – ShareInvestor’s stock price list can be sorted with some useful filters. This includes sorting counters by trading metrics like ‘Top Active’, ‘Top % Gainers’ and ‘Top Turnover’, alphabetically, and by industry.

The winning feature for me, though, is the ‘Fundamental’ screen. This lets you rank securities on financial ratios and other characteristics including ‘Highest Dividend Yield’, ‘Highest Discount to Cash Value’ and ‘Highest Return on Assets’. These filters are a subset of what’s available on ShareInvestor’s website, and they are a boon to those among the investing public who believe in Buffett-like ‘fundamental analysis’. To my knowledge, ShareInvestor is the only app that gives you this on-the-fly screening of Singapore-traded equities’ fundamentals.

To be sure, some of the ratios are wrongly calculated. I’ve come across such instances on the ShareInvestor website, which I assume uses the same data as the app. For example, the gophers at ShareInvestor didn’t account for the fact that one company I was tracking reported its earnings in Chinese Yuan and not Singapore Dollars. Its financial ratios ended up vastly inflated as a result.

The Bad

The competition is slicker – Why use ShareInvestor when you’ve got free apps with nearly as much content and much slicker interfaces? Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters News Pro are two apps that immediately come to mind. Of course, both those apps only supply proprietary news, unlike ShareInvestor’s mix of SPH, Dow Jones and exchange filings, but Bloomberg and Reuters are two of the biggest names in financial journalism.

Crippled portfolio feature – The portfolio function is only available to ShareInvestor subscribers. It looks like this was an attempt to strike a balance between a free app and driving sales to the main ShareInvestor portal. Unfortunately, it’s probably a miscalculation. When you log in on the ShareInvestor app, using the same credentials as on the web portal, all your stored portfolios are automatically displayed. This was a pleasant surprise for me, since I use the web portal as my main means of tracking my portfolio of Singapore-listed stocks.

But this feature puts ShareInvestor a rung below the competition, since both the Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters apps allow you to track portfolio stocks, including Singapore-listed companies, for free. In the end, crippling the portfolio feature for non-members only reduces the app’s utility and encourages them to look elsewhere for a stock-tracking app.

Bugs –  The app crashed twice in the two days I tested it. On two occasions, entries were duplicated in the portfolio section. And, because the app constantly fetches the latest price information, it can be a big drain on battery life. For example, my iPhone 3GS (WiFi and Bluetooth off, 3G connection on) lost 15 percentage points on the battery gauge after leaving the app on for about 15 minutes. You better have a charger within reach if you’re going to be using this app heavily.

The bottomline

Worth downloading if you have an interest (or a stake) in Singapore-listed securities. The news feed and fundamentals filter are best-in-class and unique. But the members-only portfolio feature can seriously limit the app’s usefulness. Its competitors, after all, are also free, better-designed, less buggy, and have free portfolio trackers.

Link to full article