Why should we stick with Zerodha?

@nithin @siva
guys, lets assume the new margin policy is implemented and intraday leverage is scrapped.
do you realize now you have a big competitor to compete with in broking space?
competitor have better and stabler trading platform with lots of features that most indian retail traders aren’t even aware of.
overall similar pricing structure, even cheaper for FnO (zerodha flat 20/order vs competitor min 6/order max cap at 20/order).
now I pay @Sensibull 1000/ month for options strategy buider, greeks, fno screener and 4000/month for kite connect API access.
But competitor provides all options data and features that aren’t provided by Sensibull even for pro plan subscribers at free of cost.
API access with DDE, RTD, websocket is also provided free of cost by your competitor.
Superior platform with variety of order types, conditional orders, historical data, features of Pi, Sensibull, kite connect, tickertape all under single stable platform.
Now i would save a little from brokerage and save 5500/month paid to sensibull and kite connect by migrating. I know you have been aggressive in pricing all through your journey. I sticked with you guys for leverage.

And when leverage is out of picture, your competitor looks leaps and bounds ahead of you. How are you guys planning to retain your customers? Can we expect any reduction of price structure anytime soon?

PS: Can anybody guess “the competitor”?

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Is the competitor Upstox? Are they actually providing all that for free?

You said leverage will be out of the picture, won’t it be out of the picture for all brokers under the new regulations?

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I am not sure if you have seen all features of sensibull and what all can be done using it.

We were never competing in terms of leverage.

My personal view, I don’t think so anyone will come close to Zerodha in terms of products or technology. In fact it will be good for the industry if others are working on products instead on pricing and leverages.

No plans as of now.

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You have no idea who your competitor is, do you?
BTW it is Interactive Brokers India. I hope, I am not breaking any guidelines by mentioning the name. and I am sure you guys are mature enough to allow healthy discussions.

Been using Sensibull pro for 8 months now. I pretty much spend few hours daily on Sensibull.
There is not a single feature that is available with @Sensibull that is unavailable in TWS. While I can mention dozens of important features that are missing in Sensibull. It would be nice if @Sensibull Abid pitches in here.

Yep, you are right. Yow were never really competing in leverage game. But you did provide 3X for intraday writing. But Interactive Brokers never provided leverage right from their start in 2009. They have been practicing all along what SEBI has instructed now. They never funded with their money. Be it intraday or intrahour, CNC, they block full margin. So leverage is the only place where you guys stood out. Now that is out of the frame, they look very promising now.

Really:joy::rofl:. you do win hands down when compared with other Indian brokerage houses. Hmmm, But I don’t know If zerodha can even be compared with Interactive Brokers in terms of products and technologies. Other Indian brokers really need to work hard on their products and tech. You also need to work on products and tech, but not as hard as other brokers. But I believe Interactive Brokers has everything in place. I guess they have already worked. I can’t find anything for them to work on. If you can find anything, please let me know. I will pass on the request.
But I don’t know If they will take requests like you guys do. So you do win on customer interaction, twitter responses, down-to-earth founder responding to customers. They don’t even advertise themselves, I guess there is no need to contact them after all. No downtime, all features already in place, So, never got the need to reach out to them.

As I said I earlier, many guys here will not even be aware of Interactive Brokers, let alone their features. But I hope @nithin and Abid @Sensibull are.

siva, If you can say one feature that is available with zerodha and missing with IBKR, I would be glad.

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Shenoy,
No not upstox. It is Interactive Brokers.
Yep, they do provide all that for free. But, They have a monthly minimum of 200 rs for each user. If you generate more brokerage than 200 rs, it is waived. Apart from than you need to maintain 7000 Rs ledger balance to get market data. That is all. Now that leverage is out of picture, Interactive Brokers rules them all hands down.

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Two reasons I am not using IB: 1. No leverage for intraday CASH/FNO 2. it doesn’t allow trading on US holiday (not sure if it changed now)

Now if FNO/CASH intraday leverage is wiped off completely then there is no real competitor of IB in india. There is no match to their trading APIs

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  1. If leverage is scrapped for good, no real incentive to stick with zerodha. pros of IB outweighs pros of Zerodha.
  2. Yeah earlier they used to do that. Now IB is closed in India only on New Year. Besides I take off on New Year. So no worries.

PS: Zerodha guys have unlisted the topic. So this topic won’t be visible to public.
PPS: Not here to defame zerodha or fame IB. I am a zerodha fanboy and want zerodha to be better than IB one day.
PPPS: It would be nice if @nithin just sees this topic and acknowledge.

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I don’t know why you think I am against the leverage,

We have the largest community of retail traders, we will probably be the most affected brokerage in terms of revenue. But if you go through the explanation above, there is no real way to oppose it, is it? Also once it is put out as a rule, the penalty for breaking rules for brokerage firms is quite high. Us discussing it openly is atleast getting all brokers to put an effort to see if the rule can be changed. Keeping quiet isn’t a solution, it would eventually end up being stopped without anyone getting a chance to protest.

One of the things that SEBI has done with the recent circular on margin collection and through this clarification from the exchanges is to ensure that a client can only trade with his/her own funds only to the extent allowed. Forget other client funds, but the broker can’t put his own funds to fund the client as well. Maybe the broker should be allowed to intraday fund using their own capital if they are ready to take the risk and that is something we have been asking for. But this requires changes in derivative product design at SEBI, which is extremely tough, especially in an environment where the industry is hurting due to regulatory pressure after the incidents at Karvy and BMA. Hopefully we will soon have the good news of margin requirement dropping drastically for F&O positions that hedge each other.

We are fighting to have some sort of leverage, but keeping quiet about it like other brokers isn’t the right thing to do. I use our competitor’s products. The better product will eventually win, I don’t think businesses can hide behind regulatory arbitrages for too long. So yeah, we are also working to make sure our products can stay ahead of the competition.

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@nithin I dont really think you are against leverage. I’m all for calculated leveraging. And I know for a fact that you are for it. I even remember you questioning to Jhunjunwala on leverage.
We all should abide by the law of land and if SEBI scraps leverage, so be it. Nothing is in our hands. Traders are nothing if not adaptable.

Now, Leverage is one thing that made us stick with Zerodha over Interactive Brokers. with that gone now, what is your edge over Interactive Brokers to retain traders?
Interactive Brokers TWS provides free APIs, free FnO data and analysis. Now we pay 4000 for kite.connect and 1000 for @Sensibull. (total 5000/ month)
Are you ever planning on bringing these features under kite like IB does?

There is no doubt that we are gonna lose out some returns after leverage ban. So shelling out 5000/month for features that are available for free elsewhere is burning holes on our ledger.

IB is keeping quiet because they never provided leverage in first place. So no point is clarification from them.

If IB can do it for free, Why can’t Zerodha? Or is there a “if you are not paying for a product, you are the product” for being Interactive Brokers client?
@nithin throw some lights on , brother.

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Dude there is already too much to chew right now. We will figure what direction the business should take going forward. But you can be rest assured that we are probably in the best place to be nimble enough to change the direction of our business as and when required.

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@nithin I understand, brother.

Also @Sensibull is a separate entity. So making any request to you to change their pricing is pointless.

On that note, I understand people tend to over exploit kite connect’s historical API. But free access to trading API is just gonna increase the number of orders, since automated guys generally trade multiple instruments, strikes at same time, thereby generating more brokerage indirectly.

Upstox API is cheap, but recently they have stopped giving access to API completely. Even Fyers has started free access to API. But I am having a terrible kite hangover.

So please consider decreasing the price for accessing trading APIs.

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Interesting. I stay away from foreign companies as there might be some restrictions from SEBI/Exchange in the future. And resolving issues on uncertain events. i saw Finvasia, IB looks interesting. Telephone orders are expensive and holidays is uncertain

Regarding restrictions from SEBI and Exchange, IB has a separate India entity in Mumbai. Getting global account to invest in foreign markets is complicated, but getting NSE brokerage is fairly similar to other brokerages.

And yeah telephone orders are way expensive, maybe because they do not want people to call them and trade. Their TWS is stable like a rock. I would rate their stablility few notches higher than NEST. So even if they charge 10000 rs for call and trade, I would not care.
Also no MIS or intraday orders, so no RMS auto square-off charging call and trade charges.
I have not experienced single downtime in past 5 years. That may also be because of the fact they have only few thousand clients. :rofl::joy:

Holiday on New Year. I don’t trade on New Year. So no worries. No other unannounced holidays.

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@Gautam I do use zerodha for intraday trades and given a choise to do positional trade, currently I would not go to any other broker other than IB, unless something huge changes overnight.

If you meant positional trades are not as profitable as intraday, and doing just positional trades has no point, you are in for a treat. I believe you must be trading with small account. I started with a small account, compounded it using intraday and today I trade with a lower single digit crore account and in intraday with my kind of capital I will be moving the markets. So when you scale up your account, you will have to get comfortable with positional in order to grow your wealth (otherwise no point in trading for living) and stability is as important for positional as it is for intraday.

And with your suggestion to go with traditional bank brokers, here I am saying even Zerodha lags behind IB in tech and products, so traditional bank brokers doesn’t even come close to IB.

Your comment shows that you obviously have no idea about TWS. For example, how many order types are you even aware of? May be 5 or 6 (LMT, MKT, SL, SLM, BO, CO). TWS provides over 50+ order types and I use nearly 15 out of 50+ order types on a regular basis.

And if you think IB as some shady broker, you are mistaken. It is a NASDAQ listed company with 20B USD market cap. It is good to compare Zerodha with IB, because I dream a day when zerodha can compete with IB and TD. I would any day choose to pay brokerage to make nithin rich than some random American.

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It’s not fair to compare IB with Zerodha .
IB is miles ahead of any other brokers including zerodha when comes to technolgy , terminal and APIs ( I used kite APIs and have seen Demo given by my trading friend Using IB APIs ) .

For any novice traders want to test trading , Zerodha is the best . Terminal is simple and no annoying advisory calls .
Have used both NEST and ODIN , both are miles ahead of any terminals offered by kite ( not considering PI )…

@siva , basket order facility will be extremely useful for the option players , not sure why it’s still not there in kite.
Its pretty easy to implement , I am a developer , if you can give me 3/4 resources and decent money , i myself will deliver it for you guys :smile:

But if seomeone has a working strategy and scale it using leverage , then Zerodha is useless .

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Kite is still best for its minimalistic UI. I have been using TWS and Pi for years and at times while anxious, I still stumble.
We all start as novice with Zerodha. But when we scale up, Zerodha isn’t useful at all.
Maybe very few scale up and they don’t feel like equipping us as we don’t generate much revenue.

If you think basket orders in NEST is great, you should give MIT, pegged order, conditional orders , SNAP orders a try using TWS demo.

Still I have a Zerodha hangover.
So if we start nagging nithin from now, we will get it all few years down the lane. After all nithin is the only guy we can count on. Every other broker is completely dependent on Reuters for NEST.

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Everyone sign this petition PLEASE

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This will come soon.

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These things don’t help at all, unfortunately our lawmakers do not listen to the citizens for whom the law is made. I’ve signed anyway.

Agile is a better word :slight_smile: challenges/business threats will only make you even stronger!

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