Category: Finance

Joining many other print publishers, The Economist has just launched apps for iOS, PaidContent reports. There are two separate apps available, one optimized for the iPad, and one for the iPhone. Both contain all the material from the print editions, but there are no fancy UI effects here, compared to other magazines -- it's all nice and subtle touches to make the reading experience enjoyable. ...

Utterly insane: depending on which browser you use to visit the Capital One Auto Loans website, you will be offered a different APR. With Firefox 3.6 and 4.0 I experienced significantly lower rates than Chrome 8 and Internet Explorer 9 -- 3.1 percent versus 3.5 percent! That could be thousands of dollars over a three- or five-year car loan. Whether this is truly bias towards one group of ...

Most carriers don't just offer one cellphone package; you usually get a wide variety of options – how many text messages per month, how much data traffic, how many minutes, etc. Up until today, I would usually lean towards the "unlimited" options, just because it made me feel safer. After all, nobody likes to find out at the end of the month that they were charged extra for going over the ...

Cost of living calculations are really tricky. They require a ton of data, and the data keeps shifting and changing. So, when you're trying to figure out the relative difference in cost of living between two places, it's best to have more than one source. Some time ago, I wrote about Expatistan, and commenter Jack recommended Numbeo in reply. He says that it "seems to be a bit better," and I tend ...

When I wrote about Amazon price tracker Tracktor, commenter Accounts pointedly remarked, "camelcamelcamel.com blows this site out of the water." Boy, he was right. Despite its odd name, camelcamelcamel is a serious-looking Amazon price tracker, with a Firefox add-on and a Chrome add-on. The site uses a chart format similar to Tracktor's (I don't know who's imitating who here, though). They ...

Stock traders are among the many groups of people who have taken up Twitter as a way to discuss their interests. They've even developed their own shorthand; a stock symbol is typically prefaced with a dollar sign, such as $MSFT, and tweets that discuss stocks often end with two dollar signs. Stock Tweet App has taken these conventions and used them to build a custom interface for viewing Twitter ...

TradingSim is an Flash-based day trading simulator. You can practice buying and selling all sorts of securities without involving (and risking) any money. Some might say I should have put this under our "time-wasters" category, but I think it can actually be a useful tool for people who are looking into day trading (that's how I found it). The market for trading simulators (and training in ...

Intuit's acquisition of Mint.com (and hiring of Mint creator Aaron Patzer) made a big splash last September. Users bailed out of Mint, thinking that Intuit's corporate influence would have a negative impact on the site. What I didn't see coming was Mint and Patzer's influence on Intuit's flagship finance app, Quicken. The new Quicken Essentials for Mac has Mint written all over it. As Ars ...

In 1975 Bill Gates, Paul Allen and a certain unnamed, cloven-hoofed, hot-under-the-collar associate made a pact: to rule the world! It seems, 35 years, billions of dollars and dozens of lawsuits later that they've made it. For the quarter ending December 2009, Microsoft saw a net, record-breaking profit of 6.66 billion dollars on revenue of 19 billion dollars -- in just three months! Driven by ...

I'm not a parent, nor am I kid -- but that doesn't prevent me from appreciating a totally neat iPhone app called 'Kids Eat For' (I guess the domain with 'free' on the end was already taken?) Basically -- and this is about as basic as apps get -- this app just shows you where the nearest restaurant with a kids-eat-for-free deal. The developers say that the database is kept up to date, with new ...

BillShrink is a web service that helps you find the best deals on cellphone service, credit card accounts, and even the best gas prices. Since launching a year and a half ago as a wireless comparison engine, the BillShrink team has steadily continued adding new services. Now BillShrink has added bank accounts to its lineup. In order to find the best savings accounts and CDs, you enter the amount ...

Intuit, the company behind financial management app Quicken, has purchased Mint.com, a web-based personal finance tracker, for $170 million. Quicken already has a web version that plugs into its desktop software, and Mint apparently isn't going to replace it. Meanwhile, Intuit doesn't have plans to change the way Mint works, and the CEO of Mint is joining the company to direct its online ...

Portfolio Viewer is a slick desktop application for keeping track of the value of your stock portfolio. While it doesn't link to your investment account for actually making trades, the program does plot user-entered transactions on a chart and keep track of historic stock and fund prices. You can create multiple portfolios like, say, one for your retirement account and another for your ...

There's a lot of great financial tracking software out there now. Sites like Mint and Rudder that link up to your bank account and track your spending automatically are great, but what if you don't want to give your account information to a finance site? Texthog is a lot like old-school DIY checkbook balancing, except replacing pen and paper with SMS, email and Twitter. You can send a ...

Last week Microsoft announced that it would be discontinuing Microsoft Money, the company's personal finance application. Download Squad readers came up with a number of great suggestions for anyone looking for a replacement. But the 800 pound gorilla in the room is Quicken. And now Intuit, the company behind Quicken are reaching out to Microsoft Money customers by offering tools to import Money ...