On ICICI Direct Hi Shipnil,
Sorry for the late reply. Was held up in my work for the last two days.
Till date I have used the services of 3 online brokerages
1. I am currently using IDirect and continue using the services for the past 7 years.
2. Have used Reliance Money for around 18 months and closed the account an year back.
3. Used Sharekhan (my cousin's account) for a brief period of around 4 months.
In the early years I used to do around 40/50 trades in the equity and around 30 trades in the F&O segment. But now I dont trade that regularly, but do atleast 20 trades per month. I cant say myself as a heavy trader. ICICIDirect
1. In the early years the site was not dependable and scalable. Have encountered a lot of issues while placing orders during the opening time and closing time. For the last 2 years this has improved a lot and haven't faced this issue.
2. The functionalities were very basic and limited when it was started. Now from my experience I can say that the functionalities provided by ICICIDirect is one of the best in the industry.
3. Lot of new features / functionalities were introduced after getting the feedback of the regular trading customers.
4. They even went to an extent of introducing Charts facility in their website.
5. When they started the service, their brokerage was one of the highest. I used to regularly complain to them and they also received many feedbacks on this issue. From the last year it has very much manageable. Now the total cost of a trade for a small trader works out to around 0.6%. This may look little bit on the higher side, but I feel that its definitely worth it. The reason being compared to other brokerages this is the one where the money gets credited to your account on the pay-out day itself. Like other brokerages you dont need to request for withdrawal and wait for the same. Here it is just transfer and its instantaneous.
5. Regarding the validity of orders, IIRC, I think the open order gets cancelled at EOD automatically. In one way I think its a good practise, because we never know how that stock will perform the next day.
6. Regarding the holdings view, they provide a portfolio view, including the purchase price, the date of purchase and Unrealized / realized gain or loss. It also provides a total return you have made in that stock. This is one place I am not happy. I have requested them many times to change the way they calculate the returns. As an informed investor, I would always like to see annualised return and not the net return.
7. Regarding the password issue you have mentioned, it is mandated by SEBI that it should be changed every 14 days. but here ICICIDirect allows to keep changing between 2 passwords.
8. In addition to Equity trading they also offer trading facilities in F&O, Currency, Commodities and Mutual Funds. And off-late they have also allowed their investors to use the ASBA process for IPOs, which I really find it useful.
I shall post my opinion on RMoney and Sharekhan later.
Thanks |