Zerodha Review

Hello folks, welcome to CCB. In today’s post I’ll be sharing my experience with Zerodha.

I created my demat account with Zerodha back in 2018 and I had to pay an account opening fee for it. Initially there were some hiccups because I tried the online approach. The money was deducted from my bank account but the account wasn’t opened successfully. Therefore I had to visit their office in Bengaluru. The office wasn’t too far from my home. On reaching the office I told the problem I faced with opening my account and also I had called the office in prior to let me know about the documents I had to carry. The staff were friendly and on submission of the documents the staff carried out the necessary steps to open my demat account with them. They didn’t charge me for photocopy of the documents and all I had to do was sign in the necessary sections. One mistake that I made was I didn’t make the nominee for my account, the person who was dealing with me said that I could do it later. Recently I was watching a video from CA Rachana Ranade, where she spoke about the importance of having a nominee and I felt that I should have made a nominee for my account. Well the next thing I should be doing is make a nominee for my account.

Moving back to the story, post all the necessary steps, the Zerodha personnel said that my account would be live in 2 days and I can start trading.

Well that was the account opening story. Moving on further things were a cakewalk but occasionally there were some hurdles. One such hurdle was as follows, I had my stocks on one exchange and the app was showing my stocks on the other exchange. Therefore I missed a chance of making money on one day. If you are a day trader then that could mean a lot because the market is open only 5 days in a week and one day is literally 20% of it. The issue was rectified the following day but only partially. I could trade the stocks on both NSE and BSE, now the app Kite by Zerodha showed my stocks on either of the exchange. Well that was one problem I faced with Zerodha. Another issue which isn’t really an issue is that stocks that no longer trade on the secondary markets aren’t shown in the holdings section of the app. Initially I felt that my stocks are stolen but post checking the Console section of Zerodha I could see that the stocks are there in my demat account but it isn’t visible in the holdings section. Well if you are a long term investor and if you own too many stocks (stocks from different companies) then my suggestion is kindly write down all the names of the companies in which you hold shares and keep it in a safe ledger. Also take print of the contract note that is sent by Zerodha post purchasing or selling stocks and keep it safely so that you can use it for later clarifications. And if your inbox happens to be cluttered by thousands of emails, kindly star the email containing the contract note, so that you could find it easily in the starred emails section.

Well, now let us move to the good things about Zerodha. I use the Kite app by Zerodha and it is amazing. I am a day trader and things work amazingly with this app. The app gives you most of the technical details that’s necessary to day trade. It’s also simple to use. Zerodha also has an app called Varsity that makes complex stuff pretty simple for newbies. Basically Varsity is an educational app. The next good thing about Zerodha Kite is, ease at which money can be added and withdrawn. Everything can be done from the comfort of your smartphone.

Moving onto brokerages, Zerodha is a discount broker and if you are a day trader this comes in handy. Charges for ‘Delivery’ is zero at the time of writing this post.

When I created my account the Zerodha official said that the annual maintenance fee is free for accounts whose account doesn’t exceed ₹25000. And post that it would be ₹350 / year for the next slab. However, when I recently googled the charges, a website just showed INR 300 per year and an account opening charge of ₹200. The aforementioned numbers are not a constant and therefore I’m not stressing more on it.

Well we are getting to the end of this post and the final question is “Should you open your account with Zerodha ?”. My answer to this is, if you are someone who trades a lot and brokerage matters to you, then Zerodha is a good platform to open your account. If you are a long term investor and if brokerage isn’t something that hurts you then you can definitely check out other brokers. The next deciding factor is which broker are the masses into. I recently saw an Instagram post which said that Zerodha has a stake of 38% of Indian investors and it’s the largest Indian broker. Going by that number Zerodha is definitely a good platform to start your investment journey. Moving onto competitors, it’s the time of Indian Premier League and I’m seeing a lot of advertisements from Upstox. So with millions of people glued to their televisions and mobiles during the IPL, the question is, “Will Upstox overtake Zerodha ?”. We’ll know the answer quite soon.

Well folks, that was a lengthy post. See you next time with a different post. Byeee 🙂