Stock Market and Mutual Fund Investment » Review

How Unsafe is ICICIBank Phone Banking?

Shabbir Bhimani — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 08:04:19 +0000

There has always been lots of issues with me when it comes to ICICIBank but I was fine with them until yesterday when I found that ICICIBank Phone banking is very unsafe and anybody can do any type of transactions using my ICICIBank account.

Yes you heard it right. One of India’s largest bank is having such an issue. You may be wondering how?

Call ICICIBank customer care number in your city. To log-in as somebody else you need only 2 things.

User’s Account Number
Primary User’s Date Of Birth

If you issue a cheque or even do an online fund transfer, the other person knows your account number and so all he need to do is go to your online profile to find your date of birth. My FaceBook profile has my date of birth and I even checked with Orkut and they have it online too.

Now if I issue a cheque to you I risk my complete ICICIBank account. Do you think this is tolerable?

ICICIBank online facilities has always pretended to be much more secure with password grids and what not but this type of lapse is by no means tolerable.

Are you still using an ICICIBank account? If your answer is yes it is the time to think now.

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Who’s Your Top Preferred Stock Broker – Vote Now

Shabbir Bhimani — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 09:58:26 +0000

I shared my views on as many as eight major stock brokers’ of India. The ones that I use may not be the best ones and so I thought let us have a poll for blog readers. Just vote for your preferred stock broker now.
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.
If you do not see your preferred broker in the list select other and post the name details in comments below.

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ShareKhan Review

Shabbir Bhimani — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 05:53:51 +0000

We come to the final review in the series of Reviewing Major Stock Brokers and I did share my views and experience with

and today I will share my views and experiences with ShareKhan.

Positives

Brokerage – If you have an account with some other broking house they will offer you better brokerage rate. Brokerage depends on your ability to negotiate.
Very sound Online platform as well as the Windows application “Trade Tiger”. You can do everything using the online system or Trade Tiger application.
Integrates well with your existing bank account and you do not need any extra bank account to maintain.
Mutual Funds / IPO all can be done online without any hassle.
Mutual Fund Fees is NIL. Yes you heard it right. There is no fees to transact in mutual funds online with ShareKhan.
If you have a portfolio of over 500k you can get a Relationship Manager which is as good as Motilal Oswal’s Offline account facilities.

There is hardly any negatives that I am experiencing and this is one of the main reason to move all my equity based investment and trading into ShareKhan.

If you have more to share please do share them in comments. Your views not only help me with my decision to move everything to ShareKhan but also help other fellow readers.

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Motilal Oswal Review

Shabbir Bhimani — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 06:13:37 +0000

I have an Offline account with Motilal Oswal Securities Limited (MOSL) and so my review will be from the offline account point of view.

Positives

Brokerage is lowest and this is not based on negotiation but is always on the lower side for them. If you compare any other broker they lower the brokerages if you opt for digital contract notes but Motilal offers lower brokerages even for paper contract notes and if you opt for email contract notes only they may lower the brokerage further.
Very good phone trading facility with adviser keeping tracks of your stock and advices you but to avail the off line trading facility minimum amount you should invest is 1 lac.
Good recommendation and being an investor I always like the investing research more than trading ones and some of them I do share in the blog here as well.

Negatives

They offer two type of accounts. Offline and Online but you cannot have both. I have an offline account but if I want to do anything using my PC it is not possible.
As I have an an offline account I have no option to purchase mutual funds online.
Very bad backoffice interface and it just does not work many times. Backoffice login does not work on latest browsers and you need to have WinXP and IE6 to see your backoffice ledgers .
I have an account with them for quite some time now and the issue is their phone number just keeps on changing all the time. Each few months I have some new numbers to fetch before I can execute a trade.

All in all a good service to do some handsome trading but I am also planning to close this account for lack of good backoffice interface.

If you have some experience with Online account at Motilal Oswal or if you would like to add more to offline account review please share in comments below.

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HDFC Securities Review

Shabbir Bhimani — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 03:54:58 +0000

I personally do not have an account with HDFC Securities but one of my friend have it and they have a very bad brokerage plans which never encouraged me to open an account with them. They have a minimum brokerage amount of some 25 or so rupees and that does mean if you want to start small they may not be the right brokerage house to do so.

Apart from that my friend always used to complain about the trading margins that it does not allow me buying in margin.

If you have better experience with HDFC Securities (good or bad) share them in comments below.

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Indiabulls Review

Shabbir Bhimani — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 04:23:11 +0000

The Only thing I can say is they have horrible service. See what I was forced to do.

…. is writing a complain against 2 people

1. XXXX
2. XXXX

The complain is about the MCX trading where I have bought copper at Rs XXXX for XXXX Contract but due to crash in the prize of copper they did not inform me and did not remain in contact. I was informed at around 8 PM in the night and the above mentioned people did not wish to come to my house to collect the check and they told me to deliver the check at their place.

I also gave a proposal that I can tell you the check no and you can collect the check early morning but they refused to do so and told me to scan and send the check but I dont have the scan facility at my home.

Please take this email as an official complain from me and if no strict action is taken I may even go for a consumer court complain.

If they actually dont collect the check I may incur a loss of 19,000 (as of now).

I also asked them to give me some number of higher authorities where I can make a request and I asked the same on the Logger phone ( XXXX ) at around XXXX and they just refused to give me any numbers as such or even did not bother to help me out in the crunch situation.

Thanks
Shabbir

Just avoid them if you can.

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Reliance Money Review

Shabbir Bhimani — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 05:24:53 +0000

Let me share with you my experiences with Reliance Money.

Positive

Brokerage – Very innovative and Flexible brokerage plans available. You can make your brokerage as NIL provided you pay 500 per year for trading of 5 lacs or Rs 500 per 2 month for trading of 1 crore. This option was available to me at least and they keep getting new brokerage plans.
They have an averagely good online system with lot of additional security.
You can find Reliance Money Office very nearby as they have lot of them and they are really helpful in getting things done for you.

Negative

They have a very bad phone trading facility and it once took me around 15 minutes to get a trade done using phone but if you have good relationship with some Reliance Money office people things may be different.
Online system has one major problem which is it just logout in few minutes and you have to constantly do something to remain logged in.
They used to offer very few mutual funds online.

It has been quite a while now when I have made my account zero balance with Reliance Money but yet I get lot of SMSes and phone calls asking me to reconsider and re-open the account.

If you have more to share about Reliance Money please do so in comments below.

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AnandRathi Review

Shabbir Bhimani — Sun, 30 May 2010 11:55:43 +0000

There is hardly anything positive I have found with AnandRathi and this is yet another stock broker where you should keep yourself away from.

Positives

Brokerage – If you have an account with some other broking house they will offer you better brokerage rate.

Negatives

Very bad service and bad phone trading facility.
Being a webmaster myself I found the website very hard to handle.
Again as the web interface is very bad it becomes harder to find things and one of them being Mutual Fund.

As of now I have withdrawn all my money and holdings from my account and it should ideally be closed by now.

If you have more to share about AnandRathi please do so in comments below.

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Religare Review

Shabbir Bhimani — Sat, 29 May 2010 05:48:59 +0000

I have an account with Religare Securities Limited and today I will share all my experiences with them, positives and negatives.

Positives

Brokerage – If you have an account with some other broking house they will offer you better brokerage rate. If you can negotiate you can even get 2.5 paise for trading and 25 paise for delivery. (At least they have done that to me.)
Good Phone Trading facility.
They use Diet Odin for online trading which is quite good for trading.
Good Service with Payouts and all done pretty much on time.
Daily trading confirmation calls which I really liked.

Negatives

They use Diet Odin for online trading which is quite good but only for Equity trading and you cannot transact in mutual funds using it. I am not sure but they tell me that you can transact in mutual funds using their online website and I tried using it but could not find it very easily.
They use Diet Odin which is again not totally integrated and you cannot see your positions using Diet’s interface.
Good Service for payouts but again it is manual and the system is not integrated to do online transfers like many other brokerage houses.
I have an account with Religare for an year plus now and have made some handsome money and so there was no requirement for pay-ins and I only did payouts and so I am not sure I can comment on their cheque collection system but as it is manual I am sure there has to be some glitches.

I rate their service as averagely decent service but the person who gives you call is very limited in knowledge.

Share your views and experiences about Religare in comments below.

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Stock Broker’s Review

Shabbir Bhimani — Sat, 29 May 2010 05:37:56 +0000

When it comes to making money with equity one of the important aspect is your stock broker’s service at your disposal and so this time I have decide to review all the stock broking house that I have used in the past couple of years. Believe me I have used majority of them and I will give in depth review of each of them in the next few days.

This is a series of 8 posts where I will share one review in each post and finally decide the best broking house. As I make the posts I will update this page with the link to the review. If you want you can bookmark this page for now.

Posts so Far

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