I tested the free features of the E*Trade Mobile Pro iPhone app in this video. The app itself is free to download, but you must have an E*Trade Pro account to use most of the features for trading, analyzing stocks and the market, and managing your trading account. There are only 3 main features that are free: Market overview with major indices (Dow Jones, NASDAQ, S&P 500), news, and customizable watchlists. These are 90% the same as the iPhone Stocks app that comes standard with the iPhone and uses Yahoo! Financial data. Market data is delayed for those who do not have an E*Trade account.

1.Menu: Lots of features to organize and manage your portfolio, analyze stocks and options to trade and trade execution tools: Dashboard, Markets, News, Quotes, Accounts, Portfolios, Watchlists, Trading, QuickTransfer, CNBC video and more. Only the dashboard, news, and watchlist features are free. One of the unique features for E*Trade Pro users is streaming CNBC videos that you can watch on your iPhone.

2. Overview of the markets (in the panel)– Displays major market indices, including the Dow Jones Industrial Average, NASDAQ, and S&P 500. Viewable in 2 different modes: Chart mode with tabs to switch between indices, and List mode that displays time-delayed market data for each of the indices. the indices.

3.News: The news displayed on the Dashboard is general market news and can be expanded to show multiple pages of headlines, unlike the standard iPhone app which only shows 4 headlines. When viewing individual stocks, the news is displayed for that specific ticker. When a headline is clicked, the news article is displayed in the E*Trade Mobile Pro app itself instead of opening in Safari. This is good for staying in the app instead of switching between E*Trade and Safari, especially if you are in or about to make a trade.

4. Watchlists– Easy to add, organize, and remove actions from a default watchlist. To add more watch lists, you must have an E*Trade Pro account. A unique feature is the ability to add multiple tickers to the watch list at once, separating them with commas when entering the list.

5. Ticker View: When you click on a stock board in the watch list, you see a layout much like the Dashboard, but for the particular stock. The upper part shows the chart and you can switch views to see the stock data, such as current price, high, low, volume, etc. Below the chart/data box is the news box that shows various of the latest headlines related to this particular stock. When rotated to landscape mode, the chart becomes a full screen chart. However, the chart is a basic line chart with no options to customize anything other than whether you want to see 1-day, 1-week, 1-month, 3-month, or 1-year data.

Unless you have an E*Trade Pro account to access the advanced features, the free features with this app are very basic and not necessary when you already have the standard iPhone app. However, the advanced features are very comprehensive, almost as if you were operating from your laptop or desktop computer. I will review the advanced features of the E*Trade Pro app for E*Trade users in the next post. The only other mobile brokerage app for iPhone that gives you even more power to trade on your phone is probably thinkorswim iSwim for iPhone and thinkorswim mobile for Android.