How to Build a Stock Trading App: All Questions Answered

Gone are the days when people used to fear trying new things. These days, they get more excited than scared when giving a try to new things. Take, for instance, stock trading. From college students to professionals, most of them are pursuing their interests, leading to a sharp rise in the investment culture across the globe. The interest in investing in the stock market gave a boost to stock trading app development, which is influencing the entire fintech sector. And all of this has become a lot easier by making it feasible to buy, sell, and manage stocks with a few clicks on a dedicated application.

So, if you are someone who is deeply interested in stock market apps development and wants to learn the process, cost, features, examples, and tech stack for such an app creation, then you are at the right place. This content piece will act as a comprehensive guide for stock trading applications and help you acquire the desired knowledge effectively. Let’s dive into:

Stock Trading App: Market Overview

A stock trading app is a cloud-based platform widely used to buy, sell, and manage stocks. All you need to perform these tasks is a smartphone and high-speed internet connectivity, and you are ready to begin your trading journey with the push of a few buttons.

A global data and business intelligence platform recently researched and predicted that the online trading market globally is going to grow at a CAGR of 6.4%, touching an estimated mark of $13.3 billion by 2026. These numbers clearly indicate why it is necessary for entrepreneurs to think of investing in stock trading app development.

How Does Stock Trading Platform Work?

Stock market apps are all about managing customers’ money in the best possible way, including:

• Investing
• Spending
• Lending
• Borrowing
• Storing
• Protecting

These apps make the most of technology with a strategic approach and handle the financial activities of their customers in a systematic manner. Once installed, such apps don’t just enable consumers to buy and sell stocks but also keep track of the market in real-time using their mobile phones. However, you must be informed that all these transactions come with several security concerns that users must consider to ensure a safe and secure trading experience.

One thing you must note is that users need to pay brokerage fees depending on the policy of the application they are using. But if you are planning to work on a new trading app development, you have the freedom to eliminate costs for your potential customers by relieving them from brokerage charges. And that’s one of the solid methods to market your newly built application for stock trading.

Why You Must Invest in Stock Trading App Development?

There is no denying the fact that there is a considerable user base for this app category across different age groups, showing the pressing need to put your money on stock trading app development. Apart from that, the ease of transaction offered by such apps is a feather in their cap.

The best part of these apps is that they make it feasible for busy investors to be informed about how their portfolios are operating. This compels a considerable number of users to become paid members of the app. All in all, the scope to gain a huge amount of money and fame is high when you decide to build a stock market app.

Step-by-Step Process for Stock Trading App Development

At a leading app development company, professionals implement 5 easy steps for stock market app creation. This process varies from company to company, but if you are willing to work with Binmile, the steps we adopt are drafted below:

1: See What’s Out There on the Market

You should carry out market research prior to anything and identify the niche your product is focused on. Also, you can take into account your audience. What challenges do they come across and how can you help your prospective customers address those challenges using your products? Pay heed to your competition. How do you distinguish yourself from them, given that the stock trading app is highly competitive? Find out their mistakes and use them to your benefit. Also, you can add new features, enhance accessibility, and create intuitive design. You can go through their reviews, or employ some specialists to do this for you.

2: Determine the Core Features of Your App

Think about features that you want to integrate into your stock trading app development. Payment APIs and dashboards are the most imperative ones. At this point, you should also consider adding some nice-to-have functionalities that can set your business apart from your rivals.

3: Create the Design of Your App

Choosing a visually appealing design is an instrumental step towards stock market apps creation. Old-fashioned and weird design deteriorates the users’ perspective about an application. Select a creative UI/UX team and determine the look of your app together.

4: Write the Code & Test Your MVP

Once you have a creative team and a rough idea of the stock market app, it’s time to commence online trading app development, which will probably be the first version of your platform. The team will consider different aspects of your stock trading app business. They will build a functional app for you with excellent UI/UX design, following every required regulation. It is necessary to test your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) before the launch so that you can resolve the bugs beforehand.

5: Act on User Feedback

As per a top software development company, the process of stock market application development is not over even after launch. You will have to analyze your users’ feedback and keep making changes to the app and adding some features that your customers are still looking for.

Must-Have Features of Successful Stock Trading App: Top 9 to Remember

1. Easy Login

Login is the first step of accessing an application for which developers must implement the simplest possible approach. A great online trading app can have various login options, like PIN codes and biometrics to make accessibility easier for users.

2. Push Notifications

Just like other applications, a application for stock trading must be equipped with a push notification feature so that users can get on-time updates about any price change, news update, and account activity. This enables them to make well-informed decisions immediately.

3. Real-Time Monitoring

Now, the most imperative and useful feature of stock trading app development is real-time monitoring. This monitoring process can be adopted for multiple use cases, such as:

• Price fluctuations
• Portfolios
• Trends
• Rest of the things

This way the users can stay up-to-date with the market scenario, helping them in making better decisions.

4. Cross-Platform Accessibility

A high-end stock trading platform must enable users to enter the app from several devices, like:

• Smartphones
• Laptops
• Computers
• Tablets

This ability of multi-platform accessibility offers a superb experience to users.

5. Multiple Payment Options

Having wads of payment options at users’ disposal has become essential with the rise in fintech applications. Users must have the freedom to use UPI, debit cards, and other desired payment options as per their convenience.

6. Transaction History

All the users like this feature because it allows them to watch their transaction history, including withdrawals and deposits done through the stock trading platform.

7. Market Trends & Analytics

By digging deeper into the latest market trends & analytics features of a trading application, users can become familiar with their trading environment.

8. Newsfeed

This is the least-used feature of trading app development, yet it is extremely useful for naive traders who just entered the stock market field. This section includes the latest happenings in the stock market, such as:

• Initial Public Offerings (IPOs)
• Best & worst performing stocks
• Other associated information

9. Third-party API Integration

Incorporating third-party APIs enables users to incorporate their accounts with other trading tools and applications, allowing them to analyze a wide variety of data.

Tool and Technologies Used to Develop Online Trading App: Complete Tech Stack

When you start working on stock trading app development, picking the right tech stack is essential for ensuring security, scalability, and performance. While there are several viable solutions out there, here’s one decent tech stack to take into account:

Frontend

• Web: React.js or Vue.js for responsive interfaces
• Mobile: React Native or Flutter for multi-platform app development

Backend

• Languages: Python, Java, or Go for high-performance processing
• Databases: MongoDB for flexible document storage and PostgreSQL for relational data
• Frameworks: Django (Python), Spring Boot (Java), or Gin (Go)

APIs and Integrations

• RESTful API is used for interaction between the frontend and backend of stock market apps.
• WebSocket comes in handy for real-time data streaming
• Third-party APIs: IEX Cloud, Alpha Vantage, or Polygon.io for market data

Cloud Services

• AWS or Google Cloud turns out to be useful for scalable infrastructure
• Redis is helpful in caching and optimizing response times

DevOps

• Kubernetes for orchestration
• Docker for containerization
• GitLab CI or Jenkins for continuous integration and continuous deployment

Security

• SSL/TLS encryption for data transmission
• OAuth 2.0 for authentication
• JWT (JSON Web Tokens) for safe and secure information exchange

Top 3 Successful Stock Market Apps

A very helpful thing you can do during your stock trading app development is to identify and go through leading applications in this segment. You might come to know about a few things that are worth borrowing and introducing in your mobile investment application.

Example 1: Robinhood

Robinhood was founded in 2013 and is one of those stock market apps that has gained ground recently. The app has become popular since its very early days when it drew a million users on their waitlist. At present, they have more than 13 million users, which compels new business owners to take inspiration from their ease of use characteristic when developing their trading platform.

Highlights

• Robinhood was the first app that allowed commission-free trading on their platform.
• Resultantly, most of their competitors, including Schwab Mobile and E*Trade followed the trend and revoked or reduced their trading charges.

Pros

• Fractional shares
• Trading cryptocurrency
• Intuitive user interface

Cons

• Subpar customer support
• Lack of support for retirement accounts
• No investing in funds or bonds

Example 2: TD Ameritrade

Ameritrade was founded in 1975 and has been operating in the market for more than 4 decades, emerging as one of the most reliable trading platforms out there. The organization has multiple stock market apps and personal assistant-leveraging tools that simplify the process to follow the market for naive and experienced traders both. Thus, if you are hunting for the best example of a professional trading platform, Ameritrade is the one you can go with.

Highlights

Ameritrade is available on various platforms and mobile devices anyone can think of, including:

• Two different mobile trading apps
• A smartwatch app
• A desktop application
• A web application

Pros

• Excellent customer support
• Free market research
• Thinkorswim app for advanced traders
• Traditional stocks and mutual funds

Cons

• High options commissions
• High margin rates

Example 3: Acorns

Acorns was founded in 2012 and offers a bit different approach when it comes to investing while still focusing on new traders and investors, enhancing their flow of funds. This stock trading app development provides portfolio management depending on a wide range of factors, such as age, income, and risk tolerance of users. The most useful trait of Acorns is that their investing business model runs on autopilot. It means every time a user buys a share, the app introduces the change to their investing account.

Highlights

• The application helps users develop a robust habit of regular investments, emphasizing long-term savings.
• They also collaborate with brands, such as Airbnb and Lyft to provide the cashback to users which gets reinvested automatically.

Pros

• Automatic investing
• Need just $5 to start investing
• Support for Roth and traditional IRAs

Cons

• Not a large portfolio mix
• No tax strategy
• Monthly portfolio management fee

We hope you will find some exciting ideas from the stock trading app examples discussed above to integrate into your application.

Cost to Build the Best Trading App

As far as the cost of building a FinTech app is concerned, it is affected by multiple factors, like app’s:

• Complexity
• Functionality
• Use of cloud services
• Supported operating platforms
• Production timelines, and
• Rest of the things

Taking these aspects into your consideration is essential when designing a trading application and estimating its overall development cost.

Please remember that creating a fintech application is a challenging task, but focusing on user-friendliness is necessary to improve customer engagement. In general, a development team requires almost 6 to 9 months to build an online trading application.

The total investment app development cost can vary big time, ranging from $20,000 to $40,000. However, the complexity of the app and the selected features and functionalities play an important role in deciding the overall app development cost.

How Can Binmile Turn Your Online Trading App Vision into Reality?

Stock trading app development is a massive-scale project, requiring complicated app logic and architecture for its creation. Once it incorporates the right features and functionalities, tech stack, and embraces constant development speed, the chance of its success improves.

If you want to build a promising trading application, it is advised to adopt a custom fintech app development process. You can also hire a stock market app development services company like Binmile to create an app that is unique, feature-rich, and profitable at the same time. Get in touch with us today and let our service experts facilitate the journey from an idea to an exceptional trading platform development.

Final Thoughts

Developing a top online trading apps is a daunting task, but with the right strategy and priority functionalities, you can easily achieve your development goal. This article is focused on responding to all the riddles you might have about trading app creation. In case your queries are not answered here and you want to clarify some doubts, you can always communicate with tech experts of a trading app development company having extensive experience in this field to aid in your project plan.