StockMarketEye

For investors, Wall Street is much like the typical toddler is to parents: it bears watching. If you're serious about keeping up with the stock market, sooner or later you'll need a tool that will help you track it. Many such tools involve an expensive service and subscription fees, but StockMarketEye from TransparenTech tracks stock prices via on-demand or streaming quote data, organizes your portfolio into handy Watch Lists, and even estimates stock prices based on potential movements, but for an affordable, one-time purchase price without recurring fees.

StockMarketEye's simple dialog-based interface is one of the clearest, cleanest displays of securities market data we've seen. These tend to be complex affairs full of boxes and buttons that often look more like tax forms than software, but StockMarketEye manages to clean it all up without leaving anything out. Clicking on a stock symbol's data row calls up a price graph that you can set to display from four weeks to 10 years of prices. You can also choose among several graph, cursor, and marker styles as well as select which technical indicators to chart. There's a stock symbol search feature that's most welcome for those investors who don't have the Dow memorized. Its historical price charts can save time when you're researching buys.

This is not only one of the cleanest-looking but also one of the easiest stock trackers we've used. The program offers a sample portfolio, My 401K, which helped us quickly get a feel for how it operates and simplifies setting up StockMarketEye to track the type of investments most common to most users. We created a new Watch List, quickly found a few sample stocks to track, and added them with a few clicks. Selecting any symbol highlighted its current data and called up its price graph. Dragging the cursor along the graph instantly displays the historical data for any particular point. We also like the way you can toggle easily between price and fundamentals views. A left-hand navigation pane made jumping from portfolios to watch lists easy. StockMarketEye even accepts data imported in Quicken's QIF file format. StockMarketEye isn't an analysis tool; it won't pick investments for you, just help you keep track of them. We recommend it.

Editors' note: This is a review of the full version of StockMarketEye 2.4.2. The trial version is limited to 30 days.