Review: Moving to Sharekhan from Icicidirect

[silverbyte]

Hi,
very recently I made the decision to take up a Sharekhan account, because I felt that the ICICI Bank online service becomes very shaky *anytime* there is a big market churn.

The overall experience has been good, though their customer service could use some improving.

First, their agent came to my office and showed me the normal trade scheme (0.5 % brok. on delivery) and gave me the option of 2000/- brokerage prepayment (0.4 % brok.) or 6000/- prepayment. I went for the normal scheme. Since I had 3-4 of my friends also take up a Sharekhan account, I had account fees waived off - Im not sure if this will come back as some other *management* fees, but till now it has been OK. They took a Rs 5000/- cheque which would be available to me for trading. One bummer was that they did not have a tie up with HSBC for cash transfer.

After 7 days, I got an SMS and a courier containing all account details, passwords, demo CD and a delivery instruction book.
Today, when the market went down, I thought of making some trades - even today I found ICICI to be as slow as a tortoise. Sharekhan was zipping fast!
Sharekhan web-interface is nice enough - though it takes some getting-used to after ICICI. One problem is their reports are not viewable in a nice manner on Mozilla Firefox browser (I have filed a complaint about it).

Cash transfer from my HDFC account to Sharekhan was instant. I was able to place orders much faster than I used to with ICICI (where by the time I managed to place an order for TELCO, the price went up by Rs 30 !!)

Another bummer was that the 5000/- cheque I had given on account opening has not been credited till now - though money was debited from my account on 7'th (3 working days ago). The customer service (after putting me on hold for a looooong time, told me it will take 1-2 more days).

I have not tried withdrawing money from Sharekhan, back into my HDFC bank. So, I dont know how that will go.

In a day or two, I will go and try to transfer holdings from my ICICI account to Sharekhan - I will post here on how that goes.

 

[VasanSuccess]

Sharekhan is good as per most of reviews. I suggest you keep ICICI dmat account active and use those for IPO and long term bet.

for trading u can use sharekhan. Because of simple rule

"This too can change".

 

[silverbyte]

"This too can change" - very true!

But I can then simply change my trader using the delivery slips.... Sharekhan also has provision for IPO, so I dont know where ICICI has a better service

 

[VasanSuccess]

Not actually better service, The refunds and other stuff are much easy to tackle in case of problem.

For instance, You have not got the refund money, You ask sharekhan, they will say, it is transfered, check with your bank. and registrar says, its paid.

Just to avoid one party(Bank, Registrar, Broker) in ICICI Case its Bank and Registrar

 

[constantine768]

Is sharekhan down today.Cannnot open the fast trade widdow

 

[skarpio]

[snip]One problem is their reports are not viewable in a nice manner on Mozilla Firefox browser (I have filed a complaint about it).[...]

Download IETab. This is an add-on for Mozilla based browsers. Use the 'switch rendering engine' option to switch to IE for pages that are geared towards IE. This works on th following assumptions:
[1] you are not trading from a *nix based-system.
[2] you have IE installed (most Windows and Macs have this) on your system

HTH.

 

[rajivv61]

dont know about icici direct...but i def used to use sharekhan... wasnt too happy with their platform at all..
now have been using rmoney since few months...quite happy here. maybe you should consider rmoney also before shifting

 

[Raju]

Hi rajivv61,
What brokerage schemes do they offer ?

 

[ashish908]

I am happy with sharekhan. only two problems i see

a) their site is down most of time during afterhours
b) their customer service is very bad, u r told to hold on for a long time if you call. And if you email them, they don't respond even after sending 3-4 reminders. (They should have escalation mechanism in place)

 

[hitesh shah]

One more problem i noticed with sharekhan . Of late 4-5 times in last 2 months , afterhours order instructions dont get converted to normal pending instruction in time (ie 9:00am) to be able to participate in pre-open .

It happens after actual market starts as late as 9:25 am . Their customer service is working on this since 2 days and are yet to resolve this problem.