February 17, 2021 Alexander Krabchenko
27 312
Investment mobile apps are improving every year to attract new investors looking to tap into the stock market. Convenient applications offer profitable purchases of shares without commission. Even experienced investors will find opportunities to save money and improve their financial portfolio.
If previously you had to pick up the phone and call a stock broker or take a long time to install and configure an application on your PC in order to make a trade, they don’t talk about high commissions. Now you just need to touch your smartphone screen several times to trade currencies, bonds and shares of large companies (Tesla, Yandex, Apple, Coca-Cola, Adobe).
If you're looking to buy your first stock or have been doing so for years, consider the best investing apps and brokers that performed best in 2021. Some are designed for trading individual shares of popular companies, while others allow you to passively increase capital through an automatic investor.
Quik mobile app
Quik terminals have become a kind of standard in the Russian stock market. It so happens that this desktop program has been the most common platform for trading on the Moscow Exchange from the very beginning. A kind of ready-made solution for brokers. Later, a mobile application was created, which complemented the company’s product line.
The Quik system is used as the main one by many brokers. At the same time, sometimes professional market participants also offer it as an alternative option in addition to their own developments, so that the client can choose what is best for him. This is what, for example, Sberbank does, which has both its own product and Quik.
The Quik mobile application was created clearly in addition to the main trading terminal and is distinguished by a certain minimalism. It has everything you need, but nothing extra.
Quik has market overview pages divided into tabs: stocks, bonds, futures, options. For each instrument, you can open its own separate detailed view with current quotes, charts, and “order book”—buy and sell orders with volumes. As well as detailed information about the status of the brokerage account, balances, profit or loss.
It’s unlikely that anyone will say that this application is the best on the market, but it is the most famous, quite reliable, and it makes sense to install it on your phone if the broker supports it, as a backup.
Alpha direct
The Alfa-Direct mobile investment application for individuals is considered one of the best. Now you don’t need an equipped office or trading terminal for trading; download the application and monitor quotes from the screen of your tablet or smartphone. Invest your savings in shares of Russian companies that are steadily growing in price (Sberbank, Aeroflot, Transneft) or global corporations with high liquidity (General Motors, Coca-Cola, Apple, Canon, Google).
Alfa-Direct has a large number of tools, thanks to which you can implement both short-term financial transactions and develop a long-term strategy. For maximum benefit, use a trading robot whose algorithms are configured to analyze stock data and determine the best moment for a transaction. Choose a ready-made offer from the catalog or set up a personal assistant using your own strategy.
For beginning investors, Alfa-Direct provides free trading training from scratch. It’s easy to start making money on the stock exchange, open a brokerage account, install the application, complete the training and fund your account. With Alfa-Direct it is easy to become a successful trader.
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Sberbank Investor
Sberbank Investor is an analytical application rather than a trading one. There are many investment ideas, but with their own specifics.
- Firstly, only the Russian market.
- Secondly, users note that it is often proposed to invest money in the instruments of Sberbank itself, stocks and bonds. That is, we can assume that the proposed analytics are not entirely objective and independent.
However, clients use it as a convenient source of additional, free information about the stock market. And you can make transactions through the Quik system, which Sberbank also supports.
Commissions are average, the level of broker reliability is perhaps the highest on the Russian stock market.
In addition to Sberbank Investments, this credit institution has another application called Sberbank Asset Management, but it is not a trading application, but was created so that clients can evaluate the work of asset managers.
FinamTrade
A good tool for tracking the market and almost all financial instruments. There are many options available in the application. You can view your portfolio, sort assets, and use additional settings.
Thanks to convenient sorting, the investor can monitor the state of the market. The news feed is updated regularly. It is also convenient that the application has a built-in economic calendar.
Advantages:
- Ease of use.
- High level of reliability.
- Various trading terminals.
- Excellent information support.
- Available technical support.
Flaws:
- Quite high commissions.
- A small amount of analytics.
- Depositing and withdrawing funds is more difficult than competitors.
VTB My investments
Many consider the VTB My Investments application to be the best on the market, although it is inferior in popularity to the Tinkoff system. VTB has everything you might need, from opening an account online to accessing information, attention, to 10 thousand instruments. All markets in one place, both Russian and international. Moscow Exchange, St. Petersburg Exchange and, as the developer writes, more than 33 exchanges. Participation in initial offering, over-the-counter market.
In the system, it is possible to have two accounts at the same time: regular and IIS. The application makes it possible to work with selections of securities based on their level of reliability. In general, analytics is at a fairly high level. And a lot of investment ideas for free as a gift. And also a robo-advisor, as many people like.
Transactions can be concluded directly from the application by entering market, limit orders or stop losses - orders to the broker to close a position when quotes reach certain levels to limit possible losses.
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Ninja Trader
The platform has a high level of trading and analysis capabilities. The efficiency and ease of working with Ninja Trader is ensured by a set of functions. In the terminal, participants can create trading strategies, test them and trade automatically.
The exchange platform has more than 100 indicators, highly visualized charts and different time frames. The user can use the demo version and make individual settings for each trader. The advantage of the terminal is the ability to use all functions for free.
Tinkoff Investments
Tinfoff Investments is the most popular and most discussed application for participating in securities trading. We must pay tribute to the developers; the program is truly both functional and beautiful. It has everything you need. From start pages for opening an online brokerage account to real-time quotes and analytics.
Everyone has quotes. But when it comes to supporting novice investors, Tinkoff Investments is really up to par. It doesn’t matter how justified these kinds of recommendations are, the main thing is that they exist: in three steps, based on the answers to the questions, the system offers to create a portfolio.
Markets for currencies, stocks, bonds are available, there are fund quotes and so on. And to all this - ideas on what to buy. And also, the broker’s own proposals are to invest in Tinkoff exchange-traded funds.
The only and main drawback of the Tinkoff Investments application is Tinkoff itself and its tariff policy. However, there is no such thing as free and high quality; you have to pay for everything.
Transaq terminal
An alternative version of the QUIK terminal is TRANSAQ, which is actively used by brokers VTB 24 and Finam. The platform is similar to QUIK in some options and the appearance and layout of bookmarks. Its difference lies in its limited functionality and the lack of providing the client with more detailed information and capabilities.
Transaq Features
The terminal makes it possible to carry out transactions with many instruments of international platforms. Information on the features and value of options in TRANSAQ is displayed in a table on financial transactions, which is not similar to the options board and contains less information.
The remaining groups of terminal tools are identical to those available in QUIK. In addition, there is no possibility on the site to transfer funds to bank accounts, from one exchange to another and between exchange sections.
Trading operations in Transaq
In trading operations, you can set limit and stop orders. In a simple form, an iceberg order and related orders such as take profit or stop loss are placed at the limit. On the platform, you cannot place a stop order with a stop price for another instrument, which creates problems. This operation is required when performing complex exchange transactions. The user will not be able to create a transaction pocket in TRANSAQ for the purpose of entering a large number of orders at once.
Analysis in Transaq
The analysis process on the trading platform is the same as QUIK. They have similar indicators and graphical analysis options. TRANSAQ does not have the ability to build a bond yield map. The terminal does not have a module that displays option strategies.
The client can export stock exchange information to other applications in order to carry out in-depth statistical analysis. The user can transfer information from tables to Excel, which improves work with exchange data.
Portfolio monitoring and analysis in Transaq
The assets available in the investment package are reflected in the same way as in QUIK. A separate column shows the cash balances and the securities limit. Reflection of data on the client's overall portfolio is provided in tabular form with all lines from the accounts, including information about stocks, bonds and futures.
Simplicity and convenience of Transaq
A small set of functions makes it easy to understand how the platform works.
Most transactions are easier to implement than in QUIK, especially when new options and characteristics are included for their analysis. Almost all options are located in the table menu without a long list of additional operations. The capabilities of the built-in functions are less than in QUIK. This feature has the advantage of reducing the likelihood of confusing data, but complicates the work if a novice investor solves a difficult problem using a filter and different analysis methods.
Brokers often use TRANSAQ as a brokerage platform. Here participants can use limits on client accounts, conduct settlement and repo transactions, and also monitor the risks of transaction failure.
Interactive Brokers
And for comparison, at the end - a brief review of the popular Western broker Interactive Brokers. As they say, what about them? In fact, the application for mobile devices is almost the same as the Russian development. There is less analysis and advice, because Interactive Brokers is considered simply a discounter, a company that provides cheap access to exchanges for traders and private investors. The program pages contain quotes, portfolio results, charts, and so on.
Available markets are the world's main platforms. American securities, European and others. Almost everything that is available, but Russian markets, unfortunately, are not included.
Interestingly, Interactive Brokers also offers its services to Russians, and is ready to communicate with clients in Russian. And the commission is, for example, for shares - from 0.0005 to 0.0035 dollars per share, depending on the volume.
Interactive Brokers has a US securities license and its accounts are insured for up to $500,000 per investor in the event of a broker's bankruptcy.
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Investing
Official website -investing.com.
A foreign site with support for a Russian-language interface. Here you can monitor financial instruments and analyze your own assets in your portfolio for free.
Peculiarities:
- Supports most instruments, including cryptocurrency and futures.
- It is possible to create multiple portfolios in different currencies.
- Charts, statistics, flexible settings for displaying the necessary information.
- Download broker report.
- You can study securities in the context of fundamental, technical and graphical analysis.
The downside is that there is no way to account for cash and dividends.
Acorns
If you don’t want to think about where to invest and prefer to invest little by little and regularly, Acorns will be the best option for you. You link your bank card to it, and the app will automatically round up the amount of your purchases to the next dollar, and invest the difference in one of five portfolios of exchange-traded funds managed by professionals.
For accounts with a balance of less than $5,000, fees are just $1 per month. Accounts with a balance of more than $5,000 are subject to a monthly fee of 0.25% of profits.
Portfolios of exchange-traded funds allow you to invest and make a profit without major initial investments. A dollar here, a dollar there, investments add up gradually.
Bloomberg
Founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981, Bloomberg is one of the largest providers of financial information in the world. The company created the Bloomberg Terminal system to monitor and analyze the financial market in real time, as well as to carry out transactions.
The Bloomberg app allows you to quickly get the latest news from the financial world. It's easy to customize. You can choose the type of information to receive. It is possible to create your own investment portfolio.
Content
eToro - Buy and invest in assets
Our rating
- Buy over 2,400 shares
- Trade thousands of CFDs
- Deposit funds from debit/credit card, e-wallet or bank account and PayPal
- Ideal for beginner traders and highly regulated
- Only real cryptocurrencies are available for US users.
Visit eToro
75% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider. You should consider whether you can afford to risk losing your money.
Robinhood
Robinhood – allows you to trade online on major exchanges without commission fees. The creators of the program decided that technology should help engage in brokerage activities with minimal overhead costs. Just download the app, connect to your bank, fund your account and you're ready to trade.
Robinhood requires a minimum balance of $2,000 to open an account. This is a regulatory requirement. You can also earn up to $500 by referring friends to Robinhood.
Robinhood also offers to earn money on cryptocurrencies without any commissions. To do this, you will need a Robinhood Crypto account. The minimum purchase amount is $0.10 for Bitcoin and $0.01 for Ethereum.
Despite its apparent simplicity, the program uses the same modern security mechanism as traditional financial institutions. The development company is a member of FINRA and SIPC. The program is currently only available to people living in the US, but the developers have announced plans to expand.
