StocksTracker: Real time stock

Review by eFreeware

Anyone who follows the markets on a phone runs into the same annoyance: the price on the screen is often old. A quote can lag by a quarter of an hour, which is fine if you check a holding once a week and useless if you are watching a position move through the afternoon. That gap between what a stock is doing and what your phone shows you is the problem StocksTracker sets out to close.

StocksTracker: Real time stock is a free Android app from Dajax LLC in the Finance category. It has been on Google Play since February 2013, has passed 500,000 installs and holds a 3.9 average from 7,640 ratings. The pitch is straightforward: streaming quotes, watchlists, portfolio tracking, charting and market scans bundled into one app rather than spread across several.

Streaming quotes without the refresh button

The centerpiece is a streaming quote engine. Rather than pulling a price each time you open a screen, the app keeps quotes flowing, so there is no manual refresh and no fifteen- or twenty-minute delay on the symbols you follow. The developer is careful to attach a timestamp to every price, which matters more than it sounds: a number without a time next to it is hard to trust when you are deciding whether to act.

Coverage extends beyond the regular session. Pre-market and after-hours prices are included, so an earnings release before the opening bell or a late announcement after the close shows up rather than waiting until the next morning. One limit is stated plainly: real-time quotes apply to USA stocks only. If your holdings sit on other exchanges, the streaming element is not what you would be installing this for.

The watchlist side is built to be flexible. You can create as many watchlists as you like, add as many symbols as you want to each one, delete entries and reorder them, and look up tickers by symbol. Someone tracking a handful of large caps alongside a longer list of speculative names can separate the two instead of scrolling through one unwieldy list.

Alerts, portfolios and technical scans

Alerts run on the same streaming engine, and the developer says they fire within seconds. You can set an unlimited number of push notifications, triggered by price, by price change or by percentage move. For anyone who cannot sit watching a chart all day, that is the feature that does the work: set a level, put the phone down, and let the notification find you.

Portfolios are handled with similar generosity. There is no cap on how many portfolios you keep or how many positions each one holds, and you can delete or reorder both. Each portfolio gives a gain and loss summary, and each position has its own gain and loss detail, so you can see how a single holding is doing as well as how the whole account stands. Existing records can be imported from goog or yahoo finance, which saves re-entering positions by hand.

The scan section is where the app goes past simple quote checking. It covers 52-week highs and lows, unusually strong volume gainers and losers, 50/200 moving average crossovers, MACD crossovers, RSI oversold and overbought readings, moves above or below the Bollinger Band, SAR buy and sell signals, ADX uptrends and downtrends, Aroon uptrends and downtrends, and gap ups or downs. These are standard technical screens, and having them in the same app as your watchlist means less switching between tools.

Charting rounds it out with 1-minute, 5-minute, 15-minute, daily and weekly views, plus a full-screen mode for when a small window is not enough.

What the app asks of you

StocksTracker is free to download, and it carries ads alongside in-app purchases. The developer describes the alert feature itself as completely free.

The other requirement is coverage. Real-time streaming is limited to US stocks, so the app is built around that market. There is also a practical expectation that comes with any streaming tool: prices arrive continuously. The most recent update brings performance improvements and faster startup, the kind of maintenance you want to see in an app of this age.

Getting useful results from it

The sensible way in is to start with a watchlist rather than a portfolio. Build one list of the names you actually follow, keep it short enough to scan at a glance, and add a second list for ideas you are still researching. Symbol lookup makes it quick to find tickers, and reordering lets you push the ones you care about most to the top.

From there, alerts are worth setting early. Choose a price or percentage threshold that reflects a decision you would actually make, not a round number, and let the notification do the watching. Pairing a few alerts with a daily scan gives you two different lenses: one tells you when something you own moves, the other surfaces names you had not thought about.

Once positions matter, move them into a portfolio and use the per-position gain and loss detail to see which holdings are pulling their weight. If you already keep records in goog or yahoo finance, importing them first saves a tedious round of manual entry. For chart work, the weekly view is the better starting point for a longer-term read, with the intraday intervals reserved for checking how a move developed on a specific day.

A capable free option for US market watchers

StocksTracker covers a lot of ground for a free app: streaming quotes with timestamps, pre-market and after-hours pricing, unlimited watchlists and portfolios, push alerts and a broad set of technical scans, all in one place. The 3.9 average from a large body of ratings suggests a settled, widely used tool rather than a new arrival, and more than a decade of updates points to an app that is still being maintained.

The audience is fairly specific. If you follow US stocks and want live prices, alerts and screening, this is a reasonable place to start. If your interest is in other markets, or you want research and analysis rather than quotes and technical signals, the app is built for something narrower than that.

My advice is to install it, build one watchlist and set a single alert. That takes a few minutes and tells you whether the streaming quotes and notifications fit how you follow the market. If they do, the portfolio tools and scans are there when you want them.

What's new in version 8.0.10

Performance improvements and faster app startup.