Quotes & Research
In terms of stock quotes and research, Qtrade’s MobileWeb is a tale of two cities. On the one hand, the quotes function is not as accessible or flexible as it needs to be when trying to look up a company’s stock symbol. On the other hand, the research components provided in the mobile website are robust and provide a great deal of information on markets, commodities and select stocks.
Quotes
The stock quotes provided are snap quotes, meaning that user needs to refresh a quote in order to get the latest price on it. For stocks, there are a number of fields that can be populated to provide information on the particular stock once a quote is obtained. It was great to be able to see the dividend information (yield, ex-dividend date, payout date) provided as well as the inclusion of technical and fundamental data. What was interesting to note was that even though certain fields, such as “Beta” or “market cap” were available, they weren’t populated meaning that the user gets presented with information they don’t need and can’t use.
Looking up information on ETFs was an interesting experience in that the quotes returned less detail than a stock quote and sometimes provided information inconsistently. Information on the technical movements (e.g. 200d moving average) or the dividend yield were not provided consistently or at all in some cases. A quick test of two Canadian dividend oriented ETFs XDV (left image below) and VDY (right image below) showed no dividend related information in the quotes fields and only the latter had technical information (200d & 50d moving average and volume) populated.
