Shares magazine ran a Mobile Trading supplement 17th March 2011 edition and the SimplyStockbroking iPhone app was included. Below is an extract from the article.
Mobile for share and fund investors
By Nick Sudbury
Nick Sudbury is an experienced financial journalist and trader/investor who has worked both as a fund manager and as a consultant to the industry. He has an MBA and is also a chartered accountant.
The majority of mobile dealing platforms are aimed at leveraged traders, but we are also now beginning to see services designed for share and fund investors. It is less critical for anyone with this sort of longer-term investment horizon to have mobile access to their account, but it can still be extremely useful. My guess is that it’s only a matter of time before all the main stockbrokers will have to offer a decent mobile platform as standard.
SimplyStockbroking is one of the newest execution-only brokers in the country, yet it is ahead of the curve when it comes to mobile dealing. The company, which only started trading in September 2009, launched a share dealing app for the iPhone soon after in April 2010. Aran Gibbs, the company’s chief operating officer, believes that it’s incredibly important that share traders have access to a mobile dealing platform. ‘A lot of our clients work in the industry and have restricted access to the internet on their office computers. The app means they can catch up with their portfolios during their lunch break’.
Shares Magazine 17th March 2011
The SimplyStockbroking app is easy to follow and allows clients to view their portfolio in real-time and to buy and sell UK Company shares. It is also good value with commission of just £8 per deal. ‘We’ve had some very positive feedback from clients,’ explains Gibbs. ‘We designed it around the standard app format that people are used to, which makes it easy and intuitive to use.’
Once you have logged on, the first screen that you see is the summary page that shows the total value of your holdings as well as your free cash balance. Tapping on the securities field takes you to the underlying portfolio. This lists each of the holdings, with the current price, value and notional profit or less. To place an order you simply have to specify the stock that you want to trade, indicate whether you are buying or selling and enter how much you want to raise or invest. As well as dealing at the current best price you also have the option of entering a limit to buy or a stop loss to sell.
Tapping on ‘place order’ takes you to the confirmation screen. This displays the details of your order and gives you 15 seconds to accept the live quote from the market. Gibbs says that when SimplyStockbroking first set up its business the company was getting a lot of orders over the phone, but most of these now come in via the app. ‘At the moment the iPhone accounts for 30% of our logins and 15% of our trading volume.’