Get Stock Market Details from Siri on iPhone, iPad, iPod touch

You may already know that you can add stock ticker symbols to the Notification Center on the iPhone, but if you don’t feel like tapping around, another option is to retrieve information on markets and equities through Siri. That also means you can get detailed stock market data on prices, highs and lows, dividends, and more, not only an iPhone, as is the case with the notifications option, but also on an iPad or iPod touch.

There are a variety of queries to use with Siri to find details on markets, specific ticker symbols of stocks and ETF’s, let’s review some of the more useful for quick stock data. To get started, summon Siri as usual, then use the following type of statements or questions:

• (ticker symbol) – Just speaking a ticker symbol is usually identified as such and will retrieve the relevant market data for that individual equity. For example: “SPY”
• What is the price of (symbol)? – Typically the same result as simply stating the symbol, but tends to work always if Siri has difficulty in interpreting the given symbol
• “What did (ticker symbol) close at?” – finds the last trading days closing price, with a note about which direction the price fluctuated in and at what percentage
• “52 week high for (symbol)” – get the 52 week high for the given stock symbol
• “52 week low for (symbol)” – get the 52 week low for the given equity
• “What is the dividend for (ticker symbol)” – retrieves the dividend details using WolframAlpha, in dollars, for the given equity

For all of the ticker symbol specific inquiries that pull up a chart (that is, not going through WolframAlpha immediately), you can scroll down to reveal additional market data on the individual equity in question. This includes a days chart of price activity, the open price and days high and low, volume, market capitalization, P/E ratio, the 52 week high and 52 week low, the average volume over the year, and the dividend yield if there is one.

How useful this data is for you is debatable, but it is undoubtedly one of the fastest ways to get quick stock and market data from the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, particularly if you’re in a conversation and don’t want to start flipping through your iOS device. Is Siri going to replace something more insightful like a dedicated trading app, or the Bloomberg Pro app for iOS that many professional financial observers use? Almost certainly not, but for quick bites of data, it should be good enough for most casual market observers.