iPhone: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Stocks

This one's for you, big-time day trader. The Stocks app tracks the rise and fall of the stocks in your portfolio. It connects to the Internet to download the very latest stock prices. (All right, maybe not the very latest. The price info may be delayed as much as 20 minutes, which is typical of free stock-info services.)

When you first fire it up, Stocks shows you a handful of sample high-tech stocks—or, rather, their abbreviations. (They stand for the Dow Jones Industrial Index, the NASDAQ Index, the S&P 500 Index, Apple, Google, and Yahoo, respectively. AT&T's stock, one of the starter listings on the original iPhone, has been dumped.)

Next to each, you see its current stock share price, and next to that, you see how much that price has gone up or down today. As a handy visual gauge to how much you should be elated or depressed, this final digit appears on a green background if it's gone up, or a red one if it's gone down.

Tap a stock name to view its stock-price graph at the bottom of the screen. You can even adjust the time scale of this graph by tapping the little interval buttons along the top edge: 1d means "one day" (today); 1w means "one week"; 1m, 3m, and 6m refer to numbers of months; and 1y and 2y refer to years.

Finally, if you want more detailed information about a stock, tap its name and then tap the button in the lower-left corner. The iPhone fires up its Web browser ...