Feb 01, 2006 07:26 PM
8188 Views
(Updated Feb 01, 2006 08:12 PM)
It was in the month of October 2005 when the sales officers from Indiabulls had setup a small information counter in our office building (Hyderabad). No doubt the officers were quite friendly and they were enthusiastic about Indiabulls. They introduced us (me and some other colleagues) to the various features of Indiabulls and also offered us a scheme whereby we were supposed to pay only Rs. 200/- for account opening charges as against normal Rs. 700/-.
Needless to say we were quite impressed by the features and ofcourse the nominal charges. Immediately we applied for the account and issued a DD of Rs. 200/-.
Our accounts were functional by fourth week (as against the promised second week). However the reality struck on face when I transferred Rs. 5000/- to my Indiabulls account for kicking off the trading. The very next day they deducted Rs. 500/- as the account opening charges and that too without my permissions/knowledge. This was completely uncalled for, they had offered us the accounts for just Rs. 200/-. When I contacted Indiabulls office they denied of any such scheme being offered and it turned out that the sales officer that came to our office had either resigned or fired from the company. I emailed the customer relation manager (Will not name him for the obvious reasons) but never got a reply. Finally I gave up as it was not worth fighting for Rs. 500/- but it left me skeptic about my future relations with Indiabulls.
However I began trading through Indiabulls account and to my utter surprise I found the site quite user friendly. It is not difficult to trade even for an uninitiated in the stock market.
Now some facts about Indiabulls
1. Money Transfer
Indiabulls holds account with all the banking giants and one can directly transfer the money to those accounts. Normally the balance reflects within two hours.
2. Brokerage
Indiabulls charges 0.5% of the transaction amount as brokerage, now this is quite small a number when compared to ICICI Direct, HDFC and Kotak.
3. Bourses
Indiabulls offers online trading only on NSE. However if you want to buy stocks listed on BSE, you need to personally call them and direct to buy.
4. IPO, NFO
Indiabulls allows you to buy IPOs and NFOs but not online. Again you need to call them and lot of paper work in involved.
5. Trading Terminal Now this is the best feature of Indiabulls. Indiabulls provide with the live NSE terminal which displays the bid/offer price, quantities in real time. The list of scrips that it displays is configurable.
6. Website Load Login time is high during peak time of business, but once logged in the speed of other transactions is good enough.
From the small investor's perspective major disadvantage is item (4) in above list. It is really painful to do lot of paperwork when the world is moving to paperless transactions. But practically, the retail investors rarely get the IPOs allotted in the midst of the scams prevalent today (I'm talking about multiple DP accounts). And as per Indiabulls, in the near future they will be introducing these features along with trading on BSE.
Overall though my initial experience with Indiabulls is not at all satisfactory, still I'm happy with their online trading platform and hope that they work towards the items (3) and (4) ASAP.
