I have an NRO non-pis account with Zerodha. It says brokerage is 0 but then proceeds to deduct the Rs. 100 brokerage from my account anyway. Can this be fixed? I recently made a bunch of trades and ended up paying Rs. 5000 extra because of this incorrect Charges being showing.
Apologies for the inconvenience cause. We’re working on fixing this.
Would there be any retrospective relief?
I was misled to believe I would be paying the amount shown in front of charges for every transaction I did on the platform.
I only discovered the discrepancy when filling taxes and saw a crazy large amount in under the Zerodha charges tab on the P&L, upwards of 10k actually.
Looking back, some of the trades I made that I thought were profitable with these hidden charges applied. If the charge was not displayed, it should not be levied.
As per SEBI, all brokerage charges, including STT, GST, and stamping, should be displayed in the order window of trading platforms.
Thanks for bringing this to my Notice!!
I use LIQUIDCASE to park my excess funds, and I noticed that the charges displayed on their platform are different from those on the contract notes I received. Unfortunately, it seems that all the trades I made to park my capital in LIQUIDCASE were actually loss-making due to these discrepancies because I was relying on the charges shown on the website. I assumed the brokerage was baked into this but despite it being the largest component, it was left out.
I was puzzled about why my profits were disappearing when parking money in a Debt ETF, despite watching the charges carefully. It turns out there are hidden fees that apply to both BUY and SELL transactions. For instance, if you conduct a ₹20,000 trade, the displayed charges might be around ₹20-₹25, but in reality, they are closer to ₹120-₹125 per trade. This means you end up paying approximately ₹240-₹250 for a complete BUY and SELL cycle, which is almost 1.25% of the trade value and not profit!
Additionally, the lower charges displayed prompted me to opt for smaller, more frequent transactions to dollar-cost average instead of making a single large transaction. This strategy inadvertently caused me to incur extra hidden brokerage fees every time I made a trade, profiting Zerodha!
I was aware that Zerodha charges higher brokerage fees for NRO accounts. The least they could do is display the correct amounts on their app. This practice is deceptive and misleading.
Zerodha should proactively refund these hidden charges to all NRO accounts. If not, we should consider contesting this with SEBI.
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