No home here, only trade... Review on Hometrade

The 'Life means more' ads featuring Hrithik, Sachin and Shahrukh looked posh and interesting; but a brand-awareness study on hometrade.com revealed that people expected it to be a furnishing or home-appliances or real estate (trade homes!) company.

HomeTrade.com is a good personal investment and finance portal. I had used this site quite a lot before I took my housing loan. They have quite a few good columns, articles, and introductory material on loans and related issues which did equip me with all those loan related basics and jargon. I do recommend the site for the introductory and informative stuff that they have.

I still use the site sometimes for news on the investment and finance front.

-- Added on 27 Feb 2002 on public demand ---

(My recent reviews are very short and I am disappointing the ever-eager readers of MouthShut because of this. I have decided to make amends and so here we go...)

For those of you who don't want to waste your [precious] time and bandwidth visiting hometrade.com I will give a gist of the contents that they have. The mandatory disclaimer goes here. ''I won't be responsible for any change that they do on their site'' :)

The primary focus, as I've said earlier, is on personal investment and finance. They have a very good section on all kinds of loans - housing (which helped me a lot), auto, educational and consumer loans. Valuable information can also be found on financial services like insurance, banking, mutual funds, fixed deposits, real estate and credit cards. If you need comparative information, hometrade has a good lot to please you.

They have a secure site (Verisign) for online trading - so hometrade means trading from home! - on BSE and NSE with an online interface with HDFC bank and Citibank. A secure website is one where you don't have to think twice about typing in secret or valuable information (like your credit card details) because all information is encrypted [or coded] when it goes between the browser and the website.

The news section is exciting with good coverage on corporate, business, and financial affairs. Quotes from NSE and BSE are relayed 15 minutes late :(

I will place them on par with sites like iinvestor.com (The first ''i'' for Intelligent) and apnaloan.com, although the latter is more focussed on loans and credit. I know I'm giving you other options for similar content. Compared to iinvestor, hometrade has a better look and feel, which I attribute to the selection of warm colors for the website.

So how do I conclude. If you are interested in markets, finance and trade, you will find yourself coming to your site very often and you will be quite happy with them. The others who may come here are those looking for information on finance and investment - those like me. So, in one last sentence, I would recommend hometrade.com as a good reference site for financial matters.