The industry's quiet compromise on mobile trading is that most apps are companions, not terminals. The desktop platform gets the real charting and the real order management, while the app gets a price list, a simplified chart and a close button. Fine for checking a position in a queue, useless for actually working a trade. Traders know it, which is why so many still run home to a desktop for anything that matters.
eTrader's native iOS and Android apps are built on the opposite premise: the phone is a first-class trading terminal. Everything described in chart trading works on a phone screen, every drag, every ladder, every alert, designed for touch rather than shrunk from a mouse interface.
The Chart Rail: A Full Toolkit in One Row
On a phone, screen space is the scarcest resource, so eTrader condenses the entire trading toolkit into a compact rail on the chart itself: free-move, drawings, price alert, pending order and instant order. Five controls, one row, always where the thumb expects them. Drawing tools open from the rail into one organised menu (pointer tools, lines, shapes, Fibonacci and annotations, with a one-tap remove-all) instead of cluttering the chart with a permanent strip. The result is a chart that stays a chart, with the full toolkit one tap away.
Placing and Managing Trades by Touch
The interactions are the desktop's, translated to fingers:
- Drag to place: arm the pending tool or the alert bell, drag the guide line to the level, release. The ticket opens at exactly that price.
- Every line drags: entry, stop-loss, take-profit, pending orders and alerts reprice with a finger drag, with automatic conversion between limit and stop when a pending order crosses the market price.
- TP ladders: up to four take-profit levels per position, labeled on the chart with their lots, each level draggable individually (the full story in multiple take-profits).
- Tap and long-press: tap any line for a clean Edit / Delete pill, long-press to jump straight into its editor. The same grammar for positions, orders, alerts and drawings.
Two details make the touch experience feel engineered rather than ported. First, haptic and sound feedback: every tap, drag and executed action answers physically, the way a native iOS or Android app should. Second, precision affordances: price bubbles on the axis for every level, and selection states that make it obvious what a drag will do before the finger moves.
Persistence matters on mobile more than anywhere. Phone sessions are short and frequent. eTrader saves drawings per symbol and restores them exactly, so the trendline drawn on the morning commute is still there at lunch, on the phone and on the desktop, because it is one synced account.
Alerts: The Phone Is the Natural Home
Price alerts complete the mobile loop. Set on any device by dragging a line on the chart, they trigger server-side and land as a push notification on the phone the moment price touches the level, app open or not. For a trader, that turns the app into a market sentry: mark the levels, pocket the phone, and let the market announce itself. From the notification, the trader is one tap from the chart and one more from a position.
What This Means for the Firm
Brokers and prop firms live where their traders' attention lives, and that attention is overwhelmingly mobile. An app that can only monitor sends the actual trading, and the engagement, volume and session time that come with it, back to the desktop, or worse, to a competitor's better app. An app with full chart trading keeps the entire loop on the phone, under the firm's brand, on the App Store and Google Play. The apps ship in every eTrader package alongside web and desktop (see native iOS & Android trading apps for distribution and branding), and everything in this article can be previewed in the browser today at etraderweb.com. The same platform, on every screen your traders own.
"We refused to ship a companion app. If a trader can do it on the desktop, they can do it on the phone: drag a stop, ladder four take-profits, all of it."
— Alex Onta, Executive Director, SINGUARD
Key Takeaways
- Most trading apps are monitoring companions. eTrader's native iOS and Android apps are full terminals with complete chart trading.
- The chart rail packs free-move, drawings, alerts, pending and instant orders into one row, with drawing tools in a single organised menu.
- Drag-to-place orders and alerts, draggable SL/TP and TP ladders, tap and long-press editing and haptic feedback make touch trading precise, not approximate.
- Drawings persist per symbol and alerts push to the phone even with the app closed, with one synced account across phone, web and desktop.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do the eTrader mobile apps have the same chart trading as the desktop terminal?
Yes, full parity. Drag-to-place pending orders and alerts, draggable entry, SL, TP and alert lines, take-profit ladders of up to four levels, drawing tools and indicators all work identically in the native iOS and Android apps, on the same synced account.
Do drawings and alerts survive closing the app?
Yes. Drawings are saved per symbol and restored exactly where the trader left them, and price alerts remain armed server-side. When a level is touched, the push notification arrives even if the app is closed.
Are the apps part of every eTrader package?
Yes. The native iOS and Android apps ship alongside eTrader Web and the desktop app in every package, and clients sign in to their broker's environment with the same account they use on every other device. Distribution and branding are covered in native iOS & Android trading apps.