Stock Trading App Development: The Whys and Hows

There was a time when investors had to call up the stock exchange who would then put them on hold as they were connected to a stockbroker who would, in return, charge money to buy stocks for the investors. 

The time is now gone. For good. 

Today, brokerage firms and other investment platforms have brought the whole process of stock buying and selling on mobile. This has given the investors the opportunity to trade in their own time, without any unnecessary guidance, right on the move. 

In this article, we are going to walk you through the process of how to get started with stock trading application development – giving you the reasons why it should be done and the process of how to make a stock market app. 

Let us set the base of the article with insight into the user demographics of a stock trading app. 

Understanding the User Demographics of a Stock Trading App

Stock trading app users are growing with each passing day. You will be surprised to know that the commission-free popular trading app, Robinhood is gaining  users since 2014, although the app was officially launched in mid-2015. As of June 2022, Robinhood had 20.9 million users globally. To date, it has reached a valuation of $91 million.  

There are four categories of users leveraging the stock trading apps that you will be majorly focusing your design, development, and promotion efforts on –

• Young people who are still trying to figure out whether the stock investment game is for them
• First-time investors who have very few skills but wish to start their trade journey right away 
• Professionals who value their time and want to have a quick in and out experience
• Tech-savvy users who want to have all of their information and statistics in one place. 

Let us now discuss why you should invest in the stock trading app development. 

Why Should you Invest in Stock Trading App Development?

Aside from the obvious factor that there is a massive user base for the app category across age groups, the ease they offer is too big to overlook when listing down the benefits of developing the stock trading app. 

Stock trading apps make it possible for busy investors to be updated on how their portfolios are moving. And in return for this ease, they easily agree to become paid members of the app. 

All in all, the scope to benefit both in terms of money and fame is high when you think of stock trading app development. 

With the reason why you should build a stock trading app like Robinhood and E-Trade now known, let us move on to discuss how stock trading apps work.

How do Stock Trading Apps Work?

To put it very simply, a stock trading app is an end-user platform where the stocks are brought and sold. Stock trading apps are all about the proper ways of handling money, including borrowing, storing, lending, spending, investing, and even protecting it. These kinds of app work with a technology that assists people in complete management of their financial operations even more efficiently.

Investment and stock trading apps give complete access to the market. With these apps, users can monitor changes in market activities, get real-time stock quotes, and others. By going for stock market app development, companies are now drawing young people’s attention toward financing. 

While the traditional brokerages are still charging additional fees on a regular basis from the traders and investors, the stock trading app development is allowing the app owners to think out-of-the-box by letting the customer drive trade and make investments without actually charging them for each transaction.

Also Read: How to build an investment app?

Best Share Trading Apps 

E-Trade

E-Trade used to be a pioneer in the online investing world. Based out of Silicon Valley, the brokerage started offering online trade with the help of America Online (AOL) and Compuserve. And soon, they launched one of the best stock trading apps – the E-Trade app.

The app lets you view investments or enter trades for ETFs, stocks, mutual funds, etc.

These are only the cream of the stock market business apps that you will be aiming to reach once you enter the space. The actual list of operative apps is much more extensive.

Robinhood Stock Trading App

By offering free stock trades, Robinhood has become one of the best stock trading apps present today. The primary features of the app revolve around tracking the stocks that you own, searching and trading stocks, etc. 

The free version of the application gives you access to stocks, ETFs, and Bitcoin, but if you wish to invest in and out of mutual funds, you will have to take up the paid version. 

The fact that Robinhood offers a wide set of supreme features in its free version has made it a classic reference point for fintech app development companies on how to make automated trading software that sticks. 

Stash Stock Trading App

Stash Stock Trading App is primarily for newbies who wish to make their own investment decision by playing safe along the way. It lets you invest as little as $5 while constantly educating you on how the investment world moves. 

The apps come loaded with a series of tips and articles to make the whole investment journey all the easier.

Moving further, let’s dive deeper into how one can build a stock trading platform. 

How to Build a Stock Trading Platform?

A stock trading application is an online system that allows users to easily sell, purchase and manage stocks on a trading platform. Let us have a look at how to build a stock trading app:

1. Initiate the Project

Start with choosing your team of stock market app developers who have extensive experience in financial software development services. With their help, plan the MVP that would involve the following process:

• Conducting market research 
• Arranging sessions for understanding what customers want and how your fintech product would solve their problem 
• Utilize tools like the ‘pain and gain map’ for prioritizing features for your MVP. 

Read this guide to know the top ways of creating a sleek MVP.

2. Define the Scope of the Project

Plan the scope of your trading mobile app development process with your team. Jot out the features and functionalities required to develop a trading app of your own. Discuss how long it will take to build an app for your app development. The scope of the project would be the main timeline set by the developers with input from the sales team, project managers, and client.

3. Get your App Secured

Security is one of the top concerns when it comes to trading app development. Since the development process of a stock trading app includes sensitive information, the sector is currently governed by strict regulations. Go for mitigating application security risks like XML external entities (XXE), injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), etc. For additional security, use features and functionalities like bank-grade encryption, multi-factor authentication (MFA), next-generation firewalls, etc.

4. Design the Core Features

For expediting your development process, use managed cloud services like Mobile-Backend-as-a-Service (MBaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) platforms. After that, you can go for designing and developing the APIs for implementing the core features. Utilize third-party APIs for other non-core features like push notifications. Overall, build a mobile app that offers world-class user experience, performance, and security.

5. Organize your App Development Team

The main question of “how to make a stock market app” mainly depends on the skills and expertise of the development team that you choose and organize. For creating a stock trading mobile app, your team should have:

• JavaScript developers for web development
• UI designers
• Android developers 
• Testers
• Swift developers for iOS development
• DevOps engineers

Bonus read- How to hire a dedicated development team? 

6. Develop API for Implementing Core and Non-Core Features

Trading-related features are the prominent features in your proposed app. Start with designing and developing the APIs to immediately implement the features.

• Utilize tools like Postman for expediting the API development and testing process. 
• Host API utilizing your AWS account. 
• Mitigate the API security risk by leveraging encryption, authentication, throttling, quotas, and gateways. 
• Manage your API development and staging environments effectively. 
• Make sure that the API supports Android, web, and IOS devices.
• Design meaningful URLs for getting effective requests and responses.

Also Read- How Does the Fintech and Banking Sector Use APIs?

7. Testing, Delivery, and Maintenance

Once you have successfully launched your stock trading app, now it is time to carry out the complex testing processes for various devices. Your QA team will help identify the existing bugs and glitches and remove those. Effective testing is done by checking the applications on mobile devices. 

The defects get detected, and the functional and non-functional requirements are noted down. Also, your app needs to go through regular maintenance and support, as with technological advancements, your app will also require upgrades. 

Let us now look at the features set of fintech application development that would help you take the journey and reach the stage where the top stock trading apps are at. These features are your answer to how to develop a stock trading app similar to Robinhood and E-Trade. 

Features that Make up for a Successful Stock Trading App

1. The Check-In Process

The authorization process has to be extremely easy and non-burdening for the users. It is at this stage when you should offer users multiple check-in options – use of pin code, biometrics, etc. This way, you will be able to ensure that their experience is safe. 

2. User Profile 

Users should be given the option to save their personal information and preferences related to notifications or simply the frequency at which they want their account to get debited. 

3. Putting Trades on Stocks 

The one obvious feature that should be added to your stock market app development process is giving the users the functionality to execute orders and monitor their flow of funds. 

4. Real-Time Portfolios 

Irrespective of which fintech application development company you ask, they will unanimously tell you that nothing is deemed more beneficial than real-time updates when your users invest in a stock trading app through their time and money. Users should be given the ease to view their portfolios in real-time, and they should be timely updated to give them a very clear idea of where they stand investment-wise. Moreover, developing an AI-powered stock trading platform can 10x these capabilities.  

5. Deposits

Using this feature, investors will be able to see the status of their deposits in real time with minimal effort. 

6. Search 

In your stock trading app for investors, your users should be given the option to search for active stocks and their present rates in the market. 

7. Analytics

The stock market participants would appreciate the opportunity to look at the statistics and analyze the end result of their trades, transactions, etc. 

8. Push Notifications

Another must-have part of your online trading app development process would be to integrate push notifications. You should give your users notification of how their stocks have moved, but they should be timed in a way that they are not bothersome for busy investors. 

9. Newsfeed 

Although the feature gets the least attention, the newsfeed is one of the most crucial features of a stock trading application. For a new trader who belongs to the amateur category of stock market app development user study, a newsfeed informs them of recent happenings in the stock industry – the winners and losers, latest M&As,  IPO details, etc.  

With the feature sets for trading-based fintech apps development services addressed, at this stage, you are all set to take that next move and start planning the technicalities of how your stock trading app would run. Here are some key tools and technologies to consider that we believe will make you confident to take a step towards stock-centric finance mobile app development. 

Tools and Technologies Required for Building a Stock Trading App

With the trading app developers having a clear view of the end product, they can proceed with the selection of the technology stack. A typical web-based platform would consist of a back and frontend and a developer’s side. The most common and popular technologies that are used in frontend development are Angular and React JS. 

Both these are built for projects that are large scale and work especially well when it comes to stock market app development. 

Next, when it comes to the backend technologies, then the preferable choice of technology stack would be DotNet and Java. Both these technologies are ideal for developing a stock trading mobile app as these would support multiple processes within the application along with the implementation of complex functionalities.

How Much does it Cost to Build a Trading Platform?

The stock market app development cost is determined by a number of factors, such as an app’s complexities, features, cloud solutions, operating systems, production times, and others. location of the hired IT consulting firm, etc. When the question is how to develop trading software and what is its overall cost, then these are the factors that one should keep into consideration. 

Fintech app development is a difficult task, but it should always be user-friendly in order to garner more customer engagement. To create a trading app, your development team will require almost 6 to 12 months. The overall trading app development cost range from $25,000 to $300,000. Obviously, the cost of app development would vary between the choice of features and functionalities and the complexity of the application.

How to Monetize your Stock Trading App?

A stock trading app is designed to handle and update investment portfolios along with easy selling and buying on trading platforms. Typically, the main monetization strategy here is the commission. This kind of commission system charges interests on user transactions, deposits, and stock transactions.

With this strategy, you can also combine the freemium approach. Here all the essential product features could be utilized by the users free of cost, but for accessing additional features, they need to pay a certain amount of fee. Other sources of income include in-app advertisements, revenue for directing orders of trade execution and paid admission to various tools and technologies like API.

Let Appinventiv be your Stock Market App Development Company

Trading app development is a large-scale project that requires complex app logic and architecture. With the right technology stack, features and functionality, and development speed, you can define its success. 

In this blog, we have tried to cover your query on “how to develop stock market software” by providing you with complete details of its development process, its way of working, the must-have features, and monetization strategies.

If you want to develop a stock trading mobile app, then you must go for a custom fintech app development process. Hire a stock trading app development company like Appinventiv, and create an app that stands out in the market. Let our stock market app developers help you pick up the means to reach your goal. 

FAQs

Q. Which is the best stock trading mobile app?

A. There are a number of different options when you are looking to invest in a stock trading app. Depending on your experience level, you can either go with the Robinhood app  – if you are an experienced investor or with Stash if you are a newbie.

Q. How to use stock trading apps?

A. This is the process that stock trading apps normally work on – 

• Link your bank account
• Set up a one-time transfer or periodic deposits into your Robinhood account 
• For trading a specific stock or for keeping it on the Watchlist, you will have to click on the Search option
• Once the stock and its current trade come up on the screen, you can choose to buy it, which takes you to the page you actually have to buy the stock off of
• The selling option works almost the same as the Buying option

Q. What is the cost of building a stock trading app?

A. Stock market app development is not an exception; however, calculating the price of stock trading app development can be a trouble spot. There are several factors that influence the cost of developing a stock trading app. This includes:

Formulation of development approach: In this scenario, developers need to consider the mobile app’s platform, third-party APIs, managed cloud services, and other core and non-core features, along with the crucial tools. 

Designing the user interface: This is one of the most crucial aspects of the app that influences the overall cost of developing a stock trading app. The designers must think over the bar charts and lines and come up with an appealing user interface.

Development process: The stock trading app development process is divided into several lines, including front and back end, mobile and web, IOS and Android. For each case, software engineers need to select suitable programming tools and languages for developing the app. 

Testing, launch, and maintenance: The engineers are responsible for conducting the complex testing process across all the platforms to establish the correct performance. This is the final factor that influences the trading app development cost.

Q. Are stock trading apps reliable?

A. All the top-rated stock trading apps are reliable and safe. These applications conform to the government laws regarding money trading in various global countries. Also, they are completely encrypted and secured, ensuring end-to-end protection of your personal information and funds.

Q. Are there any legal challenges or issues in stock trading app development?

A. In case you are a newly established business and want to develop a trading app of your own, then you will have to think and check the legal issues beforehand. However, the legalities will be easier to solve if you have an authorized brokerage business and you wish to expand it into the online market. In case you don’t, you have to consider a few things:

• Get a license from the regulatory body that looks after the trading platform’s placement in the country. 
• Join the investor protection programs for increasing credibility. Follow rules that guarantee to protect the consumer’s sensitive data. 
• Always go for multi-factor authentication and AI-based fraud prevention techniques.

THE AUTHOR

Sudeep Srivastava

Co-Founder and Director