How trackers make the difference in investment environment

Remember the images we see in old-school financial movies? Busy trade floors, people screaming through phones to get their transaction validated? Well, times have changed. When you walk into a stock exchange building, the only things you will encounter are screens and computers. This also becomes evident when looking at the way people trade.

Trading in the past

The stock market was not as accessible as it is today. You needed to place transactions through brokers who you could call. The broker, in turn, would place an order for the stock for a hefty fee. This resulted in an unequal playing field: professionals and banks were able to trade faster and cheaper than individual traders. This was also the reason for a lot of individual investors to disregard and abandon the stock market as a whole.

FinTech and applications

Nowadays, you are not dependent on the newspaper if you need information about the stock market. You can watch the prices in real-time and trade whenever you feel like it. Although this sounds like an utopian investor world, there are also downsides. For example, with the rise of FinTech applications, regulators are warning investors about the gamification of investing. Therefore it is important to generate as much information as you can about the apps and the market before you start trading.

What are the best stock trackers?

This is a tricky question: what are the criteria to select the best stock trackers? We created a simple analysis based on the following two criteria:

• Functionality: what are the features the stock tracker provides and how do they compare to others?
• Development: deployment of new features and integrations to enhance the experience.

Crypto tracker integration

As becomes evident from the overview below, the number one includes crypto tracker functionality with a stock tracker. This is a balance we will increasingly see across FinTech apps, as crypto becomes an appealing investment case for investors.