StockClock Review – How Does This App Compare?

Introduction To StockClock

StockClock is a market news and stock screening app for iOS and Android mobile devices. The app offers one of the cleanest interfaces for monitoring the day’s market news, tracking large price movements, and viewing candlestick charts. However, StockClock lacks many of the features that technical day traders need. Gaining access to price alerts and watch lists also requires a pricey subscription, which is almost certainly not worth it given the abundance of free stock apps.

StockClock Pricing Options

StockClock costs $10 per month or $96 per year if you pay annually. All subscriptions come with a 7-day free trial period (credit card required).

Importantly, market news and the stock screener are free when you download the app. You only need a subscription if you want the ability to set mobile price alerts, create stock watchlists, or access the chat room.

StockClock Features

StockClock focuses on offering basic features in a seamless user interface.

Market News

StockClock integrates with Benzinga to deliver stock news to your phone. The dashboard screen offers a preview of the most recent headlines appearing on Benzinga, as well as identifies the stocks with the largest price changes on the trading day.

For a fuller picture of the day’s news, there’s a dedicated News page in the app. There, StockClock uses an algorithm to show you the news stories that are most relevant to your watchlists or that are getting the most views on Benzinga. You’ll also find multiple tabs – Markets, Earnings, Ratings, IPOs, and Government – where actionable news that’s likely to affect stock prices is spotlighted. However, the news articles in these tabs can often be several hours or several days old, whereas the main-page news articles are typically from within the past hour.

Stock Screener and Charts

The app also offers a free stock screener, although it’s a little disappointing. You can filter stocks by whether they’ve gained or lost ground during the current trading day, their market cap, price, and trading volume. But, there are no filters for market sectors, trends, technical indicators, or even fundamentals beyond market cap. You can also search stocks directly by name if you want to bypass the screener. You can get better free scanners through Yahoo Finance or FinViz.

Individual stock pages are beautifully designed. A candlestick chart is front and center after you tap a specific stock, and you’ll find news articles relevant to that stock further down. However, there’s not much functionality to the charts. Intraday trading data is only visible as 30-minute bars, while all longer timescales show daily bars by default. There are also no options to add technical indicators – including simple moving averages – to the charts.

Watchlists

Watchlists are only available to paid subscribers. But, if you do have a subscription, there’s no limit on the number of watchlists you can create.

The watchlist interface is nice, especially since you can put all your watchlists on a single page. The app allows you to scroll horizontally through your watched stocks to get a quick overview of the day’s price movements. But, other than that, there’s not much unique about StockClock watchlists to justify the $10 per month price tag.

Price Alerts

The price alerts interface is very easy to use, if a bit simplistic. You can adjust a slider to create an alert based on percent price change or type in the price you’d like to receive an alert at. You can’t define alerts based on specific price patterns or based on technical indicators like moving averages. Alerts are pushed to your home screen by default, and there’s no way to change this setting.

Chat

Paid subscribers also get access to the StockClock chat. The app is relatively young, and the chat traffic seems to reflect that. Messages are few and far between, and at this time they tend to be more focused on the app’s features than on discussing potential trades. 

Customization and Layout

The StockClock app is beautifully made, so you should have very few issues with navigation. The main features are divided across five pages, accessible from an ever-present menu at the bottom of the screen. All of the price data and news is meant to be scrolled through, giving the app a natural feel for anyone who has used social media apps on their mobile device.

However, StockClock is lacking in customization features. You don’t have any say in what news appears on the app’s homepage or on the main tab of the news page. There are no options for customizing the charts or for deciding how you would like to receive price alerts on your phone.

Platform Differentiators

The main thing that helps StockClock stand out is its user interface. The app is seamless in a way that most stock news and watchlist apps simply aren’t. Everything can be tapped or scrolled and the organization is simple, making it quick and easy to find the information you need.

However, StockClock achieved this usability in part by jettisoning features. The charts are virtually unusable for intraday trading, there is absolutely no technical trading data anywhere in the app, and the price alerts are overly simplified. There is also little to differentiate StockClock’s watchlists, which require an expensive subscription, from the watchlists available in competing free apps.  

What Type of Trader is StockClock Best For?

StockClock is best for traders who want an easy to navigate platform for monitoring stock news. This is the feature that StockClock does best, by pulling timely articles from Benzinga and offering the clean interface that traders need to actually digest the news.

While StockClock seems to target day traders with its price alert function, there is little other functionality within the app that caters towards intraday trading. On the whole, it’s hard to justify paying for this app over a competitor like Real Time Stocks, which offers advanced technical charts, watchlists, and price alerts for free.

Pros

• Extremely clean user interface
• News and stock screener are free to use
• Dashboard makes it easy to spot big price movements
• Easy to use price alerts
• Watchlist design allows you to monitor multiple lists at once

Cons

• Doesn’t offer much that you can’t get in competing free apps
• No technical data or indicators available
• Intraday charts can only show 30-minute candlesticks