My favorite trading movie of all time is a documentary from the late 1980’s called, Trader. In the movie, the camera follows legendary trader Paul Tudor Jones around for a few months. Many people are familiar with Tudor Jones because of his inclusion in the original Market Wizards book by Jack Schwager. I love the scenes in Trader when Tudor Jones is on the phone with his broker, barking orders to buy and sell enormous amounts of S&P futures contracts. There is also a priceless scene where he and his partner are walking down the street in Manhattan, and they are carrying giant cell phones and a big, bulky machine that is giving them real-time stock quotes. Fortunately, those days are over. In today’s hi-tech world, the game is much different. The days of barking buy and sell orders into a phone are gone. Now, you can move millions of dollars in the market with the swipe of a finger and the tap of a screen. You can actually transform your smart phone into a cutting edge, fully functional trading platform.
Broker
The first step, of course, is to make sure you fund an account with a broker who offers a mobile platform. The good news is that nearly every major stock, currency, and futures broker does. E*Trade, FXCM, GFT, Oanda, and Think or Swim are a few very popular brokers that offer popular mobile platforms. Sticking with a major broker is going to help increase your chances that execution is fast and effective.
Charts
Trade Interceptor is a must-have app for every currency trader. Most brokers offer very limited charting packages on their mobile platforms. The execution and trade management capabilities are incredible, but the charting is typically not. Trade Interceptor, however, is incredible. Traders can choose a price feed from about 8 different brokers. Once you choose a price feed, the app will populate charts. You can see every time frame from 1M to Monthly. It also allows you the ability to apply basic technical analysis tools, and it even allows you to set price alarms so that you receive notification via text message when the market hits a price you want to buy or sell.
News
Keeping abreast of fundamental news developments throughout the trading session is essential for most traders. There are several news apps that I consider essential, primarily Reuters and Bloomberg. Both of these apps allow the trader to filter what type of news you want to receive and you can set up notification capabilities.
I have several trading friends that actually use Twitter as their primary source of news developments. You can simply follow your favorite analysts and news sources and control the feed so that you are alerted anytime one of them tweets. This can be an extremely effective way to keep a pulse on the market all day long.
Evernote
This is probably my favorite app of all. Evernote is like a virtual notebook. You can create an unlimited number of notebooks, and then you create an unlimited number of notes within each one. The app is extremely intuitive. It has incredible camera integration, and it syncs real-time with its web-based counterpart application. This app is the best I’ve ever seen for capturing your thoughts and ideas.
Conclusion
Technology has transformed the way that traders trade. Smart phones are an invaluable tool to stay involved and informed all day long, no matter where you are. Bi Line: Jason Hoerr is a financial writer and market analyst for ForexTraders, an online resource global economic news and currencies.
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Awesome information. Thanks a lot for sharing it
With more and more people are resorting to trading for money making, i think this would be quite useful as many prefer to do trading while on the go.
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