Parqet on Your iPhone Lock Screen: Portfolio, Fear & Greed, and VIX in One Glance

4 min read

If you use parqet.com to track your portfolio and you own an iPhone, sooner or later you ask the same question Apple Watch users ask: can I pin my gain/loss somewhere I will actually see it, without unlocking my phone? On iOS the answer is the Lock Screen widget — those tiny status fields above and around the clock that appeared with iOS 16. There is no first-party Parqet widget. PulseFolio’s update today adds them.

This post is for the Parqet user who would type parqet sperrbildschirm widget or portfolio lock screen widget iphone into Google, not someone who already knows the app. Here is exactly what landed.

What you can put on the Lock Screen now

Five new widgets, all sized for the small accessory slots on the iPhone Lock Screen:

  • Portfolio Circular — a magnitude-aware gauge with your return percentage in the ring and a delta label inside. Small gains show small arcs instead of always being pegged to full.
  • Portfolio Inline — a single line of text in the slot above the clock: portfolio name, return percentage, trend arrow.
  • Markets Circular — the Fear & Greed Index as a 0 → 100 gauge, or the current VIX level. Your pick.
  • Markets Inline — same data, inline-style.
  • Market Pulse (Rectangular) — the headline of this release. One Lock Screen tile that bundles portfolio return, Fear & Greed, and VIX side by side. It is the widget for people who want one glance to cover “how am I doing” and “what is the market doing” without burning two separate slots.
  • Market Pulse (Inline) — the same combined story compressed into the inline row above the clock.

The Portfolio widgets show whichever period and return metric (TTWROR or XIRR/IZF) you have set in the iPhone app, so the number you see on the Lock Screen matches the number you see when you open PulseFolio.

Why the circular gauge looks a bit different

If you have used other portfolio widgets, you may have seen Lock Screen circles that look identical whether your portfolio is up 0.4 % or up 18 %. PulseFolio’s Circular gauge is magnitude-aware: a small move shows a small arc. It is a small thing on paper and a much more honest signal in practice — you can feel the difference between a quiet day and a serious move without reading the label.

The label itself scales to fit, which matters more in German than it sounds. “9,66 %” is wider than “9.66%”, and on a comma-decimal locale the old approach would push the text out of the ring and left-align it. The label now stays centered inside the gauge in every language.

The “needs updating” bug — gone

iOS 17 introduced a quirk: any Lock Screen widget that does not explicitly declare a clear container background falls back to the dreaded “needs updating” octagon. PulseFolio’s new Lock Screen views declare it explicitly, so the widgets render correctly on the first install and stay rendered.

If you tried earlier widget-style trackers on iOS 17 or 18 and got that broken-tile look, that is what was happening, and that is what is fixed.

Privacy: no password, no account, no middleman

The widget pipeline does not change anything about how PulseFolio talks to Parqet. The app uses the OAuth 2.0 with PKCE flow that Parqet itself provides — PulseFolio never sees your Parqet password. Your access token lives in the iCloud Keychain on your devices. There is no PulseFolio server, no separate account to create.

Languages

The new Lock Screen widgets are fully localized: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese (Brazilian). German uses the informal du form throughout. The widget follows your iPhone’s language setting.

The Smart Stack angle

Lock Screen widgets and Home Screen widgets share the same widget extension, so the same timeline that drives your Lock Screen also feeds the iOS Smart Stack. During market hours, PulseFolio’s relevance score rises and your portfolio surfaces in the stack with a swipe.

How to add one

  1. Update to the latest PulseFolio from the App Store.
  2. Open the app and connect Parqet if you have not already (a single OAuth tap — you sign in to Parqet, you are back in PulseFolio).
  3. On your iPhone, long-press the Lock Screen and tap Customize → Lock Screen.
  4. Tap a widget slot above or below the clock and pick PulseFolio from the list.
  5. Choose Portfolio, Markets, or Market Pulse depending on which slot it is going into.
  6. Done. The widget is on your Lock Screen and refreshes itself on its own schedule.

The whole setup, from App Store update to first widget on the Lock Screen, is usually under a minute.

PulseFolio is available on the App Store for iPhone and Apple Watch.