I am an active trader and investor in the Indian stock market for the last 3 years. And I have been using Sharekhan’s services for all these years. The experience has been extremely disappointing; however I still continue to trade with them because even other players in the Indian market are more or less of the same quality (As per my information).
If you are planning to open a demat and trading account with Sharekhan, please be aware of the following problems:
Extremely poor customer service - While account opening, they will treat you as king. The moment you sign on the dotted line, they treat you as beggars. The account activation wil take anywhere between 15 to 90 days depending upon your patience. In my case, it took 30 days and atleast 50 calls to their office.
Customer ’Support’ center is a joke - You will NEVER het through to any of their customer care executives from Monday to Friday. All lines are constantly busy, and I have heard that they have a team of just 100 odd call center people sitting in Mumbai that handles queries for ALL sharekhan customers!! Now even if you assume that sharekhan has just 5 lakh customers all over India (most likely they have 8-9 lakh), this is a ratio of 5000 customers to one call center employee !
Very bad site - I have been observing this for too long, and I guess other reviews on this forum also point out the same thing. On a heavy activity day, such as Sensex Climbing up 600 points or falling 800 points, you will not be able to log in to the website at all! To understand how serious this is, let me give you my own example : On the day the RBI and Fin Min banned P-notes, the announcement was made on evening. SO it was widely speculated that the market would fall big next morning. So if you wanted to buy cheap, this was a great opportunity. I had lined up my money in my demat account on that night itself and was planning to buy big stocks as soon as the market opened. Next morning this is what happened, and you can check it with newspaper reports - market opens -> loses 1500 points!! -> lower circuit triggered -> market immediately closed at aropund 10 AM -> it reopens at about 1100 points lower -> gains slightly -> recovers about 1000 points ->again a late tripand closes at 800 points lower.
All throughout this, you could not log into the sharekhan website!! So, you have lost a big opprtunity to make money. Imagine buying stocks at 1100 points lower level and selling them at 300 points lower level ! (Thats exactly what day traders do). And this you could not do just because of this shitty sharekhan!!
- They do not have any bank account connectivity. SO online fund transfer these days has become a problem. Better go for something like ICICI direct which gives you instant money transfer options.
All in all, this tiger is in fact worse than a kitten. DO not fall in its trap!!