5Paisa Trade @ the speed of thought and lowest brokerage - this is what impressed me at the first sight. But eventually it turned out to be the most expensive deal market.
I expect a broker should provider the following:
A good and reliable platform to execute the orders
Competitive brokerage rate
Customer support
Let me talk about these one item at a time about this broker.
A good and reliable platform to execute the orders
This broker provides two products: trader terminal and investor terminal. I am regular user of the investor terminal. Recently, this broker has introduced the concept of offline order. I was trying to use it But I noticed that my offline orders does not get converted to the orders next day (although the price is in the day’s range) - they just vanish from the Activity list, offline order book and pending order book. At times, the server responds too slowly and people will tend to place the orders twice (expecting its not been executed). It happened once, I was trying to sell my 150 shares of BHEL, I think I pressed twice as the server was not responding. Before I could realize anything both of the orders were executed. I came to know about this next day when I was checking my ledger. This broker charged 30% for the auction market deal - I didn’t have that much profit and it turned out to be the worst deal, I lost a lot of money.
They provide a link to check the ledger (thank god they did this). In the front page, it says ’’Client Id :’’, ’’Password :’’, ’’New Password :’’ and ’’Confirm Password :’’. Its too confusing - why should I enter my password trice to enter into the system. Do they think by entering the password, they have introduced three level of security. The fact is they don’t even think of security, they transmit the password in clear text in the HTTP transaction. On the of top of that, this login page doesn’t open in the other browsers.
Other stories with the ledger page is the transaction doesn’t get reflect to the ledger immediately, it takes 1-3 days. Imagine the case you want to track how much funds available for you. The investor terminate doesn’t display it accurately. It displays the amount available for the day trading which is always more than the actual fund. The portfolio report is not accurate. I am seeing a message from last 2-3 months that says ’’errors expected in the report... we are working on it’’.
The fund transfer is really slow - it takes 3-4 business days for payout. The payin too is not immediate, although you are doing online fund transfer.
If you have any technical issues in trading nobody is going to help you out... The typical answer from the customer care is ’’we don’t know much technical details, try this, this, this - which you already might have tried.
Competitive brokerage rate
5Paisa claims that its charging lowest brokerage rate. In my experience, this turns out to be the most expensive - they do charge up to 3%, that’s huge! There are a lot of hidden charges which the broker doesn’t care to reveal it with the customer and they don’t appear in their website or registration form. Probably they don’t want to disclose this information.
Customer support
Once I called the Hyderabad contact point. The conversion goes like this.
’’I am Ajay calling from Begumpet, I have so and so problems.’’
The guy on the other side replied:
’’I don’t know you?’’
I don’t understand why this provider is offering brokerage. They should think of putting money into some other business rather than stealing money from innocent investors.
Don’t even think of executing BUY/SELL order over phone. They are not going to execute it. They don’t deliver the forms on time. It took 3 weeks to deliver demat form to me. I think I have called them 5-6 times regarding this.
In the e-mail, support, they answer a few type of questions. If you any problem
regarding brokerage, forget it; you will get no reply.
They don’t care to update their customers regarding recent development in the market and even the new services provided by 5Paisa!
I personally think, SEBI should ban these kind of brokers.