Yahoo! Finance provides a handy snapshot of your investments

Many of us gray hairs remember that before the Internet, you could not get through high school English without CliffsNotes. The Yahoo Finance app reminds me of CliffsNotes: if you needed the bare bones plot and a few details about characters, you did just fine. If your teacher demanded serious research, you needed to read the actual book.

So it is with the Yahoo Finance app. It provides the useful basics, but not the deep research you may want for serious investment guidance.

On the other hand, you can personalize Yahoo! Finance to a great degree. Using the My Yahoo Portfolio Import tool, you can sync your portfolios from the Internet version. This a handy way to track my investments.

One caveat: price quotes refresh every 15 minutes, not in real time.  However, when I compared “Top Stories” on the Web version to the app versions of Yahoo! Finance, the app updated stories more frequently.

For financial news and updates on your own portfolio, you’ll want Yahoo! Finance on your iPhone.

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