Express Stocks is a pretty useful stock and finance news application on the Palm Pre. You can add stocks and symbols from exchanges listed in up to eight countries (in Europe, and the Americas). You can use this app to track US and most international market indices as well. It also comes with the AP Business wire service, so you can view AP news and company profiles for individual stocks and symbols that you pull up. You could also sort of use it as a business news reader, since you can just read the AP business news alone.

Drawbacks include the need to manually refresh the stock feeds. Plus there’s no real way to upgrade to a faster ticker that’s closer to real-time. There’s also the presence of advertising, though it’s pretty small and unobtrusive. For simple portfolio tracking and keeping up to date with the market a few times day, this app works great. If you’re on Wall Street and a derivatives professional, you may have to wait for Bloomberg to come out with their own Palm Pre apps.