Apple has struck a deal with a new partner for ad sales in its Apple News and Stocks apps. Unfortunately, that ad seller—Taboola—carries a reputation for employing some of the worst ads you’ve ever seen.
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With Apple not allowing us to delete its pre-installed iPhone apps, may of us take to hiding them away inside a folder on the ‘back’ screen where they at least don’t get in the way. But a report in the WSJ suggests there’s another reason you may want to hide the Stocks app: using it too often can lead you to make poor investing decisions.
The report references a phenomenon known as myopic loss aversion, in which people are likely to sell stocks when they see frequent downward movements – even if the long-term trend is up.
When people are frequently told how their investments are doing—say, if they are given a daily update on their long-term investments, by smartphone or any other digital device—they are more likely to make poor financial decisions and possibly sell at the wrong time.
The reason frequent checks are risky is that the more often you look, the greater the chance you’re going to see a drop in the price. And that has nothing to do with the stock’s performance, it’s just stats.
If you check every single day, there’s a roughly 47% chance that the market will have gone down, based on its past movements. But what happens if you check once a month? The numbers will start to look a little better, as the market will only have gone down 41% of the time. Years are better still, as the S&P generates a positive return seven years out of every 10. And if you check once a decade, then you’re only going to get bad news about 15% of the time.
So if you want to make the best investment decisions, it seems the smart money is on leaving the Stocks app well alone.
Apple has come under criticism for continuing to offer a 16GB iPhone in 2015, but defended the decision on the basis of cloud storage and app thinning.
For several years, my grandmother has encouraged me to get involved with the stock market. While she was successful at persuading my older brother into investing in penny stocks, I have never taken the initiative to learn how the stock market truly works. For that reason, I was excited when I heard about a brand new app called Robinhood, which provides zero-commission stock trading at your fingertips.
While online brokers are nothing new, with existing firms such as Interactive Brokers and E-Trade, Robinhood is a mobile-first service that doesn’t require a desktop. Whether you are a twenty-something college student that doesn’t fully understand how the stock market functions, an experienced Wall Street stock trader, or fall somewhere in between, the app makes stock trading easier for the masses.
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When Apple unveiled iOS 8 earlier this month, it didn’t take long for beta testers to notice it had replaced Yahoo with The Weather Channel as the source of data in the stock iOS Weather app. While recent reports suggested Yahoo was trying to get Apple to put even more of its services on the iPhone including search, we now have a bit more of the story behind why exactly Yahoo got the boot for weather in iOS 8. Re/code reports that the deal was made by Weather Channel CEO David Kenny who also happened to be a former Yahoo board member:
The situation Yahoo finds itself in is due to a very crafty deal engineered by former Yahoo board member and Weather Channel CEO David Kenny, who has essentially shoved Yahoo off the key smartphone to be replaced by a new offering that he has been developing since he took over the weather news and information service last year. With it, he has unseated Yahoo from its important perch.
It’s worth pointing out that Yahoo has always powered its weather services with data from The Weather Channel. With that in mind, it’s unclear if Apple possibly had plans to drop Yahoo and go straight to the source before Kenny started developing the new and improved weather service referenced above. More from Re/code on why Apple made the switch:
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Yahoo released an interesting update to its Yahoo Mail app for iPhone today. In version 3.0, Yahoo is integrating many of its other services including weather, sports scores, stocks, images, news, and web search directly into the mail app. The goal is to provide users one easy place to access all their content from Yahoo, but it’s unclear what that means for the future of Yahoo’s other iOS apps for each of the services. The feature is currently only available to iPhone users running iOS 7 and up.
When you’re finished reading and replying to your email, see what’s happening in the world by tapping on the News icon. From celebrity gossip to the latest political news, you’ll find it in your personalized, visually rich news stream.
Let’s head over to the Today icon. Here’s where you’ll find a snapshot of the information you care about most every day and search — from your local weather to a news digest to the latest stock quotes and sports scores you care about.
The updated app provides new three new tabs along the bottom— Mail, News, and Today— with Mail bringing you to your inbox, News providing a stream of all stories from Yahoo, and Today providing an overview of weather, trending content, scores, and access to web search. While I have a feeling that some might not be too happy about their Mail app being bombarded with all this new content, Yahoo has done a pretty good job of keeping it out of the way if you only ever want to see your inbox.
Yahoo Mail version 3.0 is available on the App Store now.
– Feature updates for iPhone iOS7+. Your Yahoo Mail app is now enhanced with news, search, and snapshots of the weather, sports scores, stocks, and News Digest. Access the info you need, all in one app.
– Performance improvements
– Bug fixes
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSjEMBLANjw]
If the lack of features in Apple’s stock Stocks app on iOS (also powered by Yahoo) just isn’t cutting it, Yahoo announced today the release of a completely redesigned Yahoo Finance iOS app with push notifications and much more.
The new app introduces a revamped UI alongside a number of new features. Perhaps the most notable feature is the ability to follow specific stocks and receive push notifications for breaking stories:
The Yahoo Finance app for iPhone and iPad was reimagined to deliver a beautiful personalized experience with a stream of top news and data based on your favorite stocks and interests. We’ve added Push Notifications to keep you in the know as important stories break — so you can make quick and informed decisions on the stocks and companies you follow.
Yahoo has also added new interactive charts that users can pan and pinch to manipulate and use to compare any stock, market or index to see related price changes.
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