I am an ICICI Direct account holder for last 3 years. ICICI at that time was one of the few major players in online trading and What I liked about ICICI was its user friendly web interface. I could place both IPO orders and secondary market orders with ease.
But as the customer base has increased website has become increasingly slow. Many times during peak market hours the site simply doesnot come up, and even if you are able to login somehow, you are not able to place any order. ICICI needs to do something to scale up its system to handle high traffic. Recently they have disallowed users from viewing the trade book during market hours. Dont know the reason for this but this has caused problems as sometimes you need to recall buy price and date of stock before deciding to sell it.
Its marging trading feature very restricted compared to others. ICICI doesnot allow margin trading in many stocks in which there is a scope of high intra day fluctuations, and a greater profit opportunity. Also you have to square of your position or take delivery on same trading day. So if you dont have enough money in your acount on that day to take delivery then in case of downside, you are forced to bear a loss. There are other brokers like 5paisa who provide you you to carry forward position to next day at nominal interest rate.
Margin plus feature has a funny rule. It forces you to put a stoploss price in cover order. But difference in stop loss price and limit price should not be less than 5 percent of stock price. This can make a big difference if stock price is in thousands. Also the order is not gauranteed to execute at stop loss price in case of loss, and it can execute at any price upto specified limit price. You are totally dependent on system as to what price it chooses to square off the order. Even customer service doesnt have much information on reason for this
Needless to say, brokerage of ICICI is the highest, even in margin trading, adding to risk and lowering return. ICICI strategy looks like it plays very safe for itself only, and that is really strange considering the strong financial position of the bank
Overall I feel ICICI Direct is good for those who are new to investing in stock market. For active stock market investors and traders, it is not the best sytem in the market