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I have been trading on IciciDirect for more than 5 years now. I started off as an investor and used to buy and sell once in a while. But since last 2 years I am trading heavily in F&O. For anyone who wishes to open trading account with ICICIDirect I would say - NO. Reasons :
1. Their trading platform is very poor. Quite often you will find that -
a) Their trading platform is archaic. The quotes doesn't get updated automatically. You have to press refresh button everytime you want to check the latest rates.
a) The site in not accessible during trading hours, especially on days when there is high volatility. Don't know whether it's because of their bad system or deliberate act so that they can clear off their proprietary positions before their customers can !!!
b)If you place an order as soon as the market opens, your order appears under status "queued" and remains like that for 10-15 minutes. At that time you can neither modify or cancel the order. In such cases I have experienced that many a times the trade does get executed if your price is breached while at other times, even if you see that the market price became better than your order price and stays like that for 5 minutes and then goes above your price, still your trade doesn't get executed. For eg. yesterday I had a short position on SBI at 1579 c/f from previous day. In the morning I was thinking that I should cover SBI at the opening bell as DOW had closed 150ponits + the night before. SO I placed oprder at 1555 immediately at the open. When I ordered, the price was well above 1570. After 5 minutes I saw that the trend is actuall down and wanted to change the order to 1530 but when I went there it was under queued status. After 15 minutes, when the price was below 1540, in my orders book I saw that the trade was excuted at 1555!!!! Eventually the stock did touch 1522 in the first half of the day.
c) Very often the F&O rates stop getting updated. So you don't know what is the current rate at the exchange. For an F&O trader, even a 5 paisa difference matters. So one misses out on a lot of opportunities

2) Their customer service is very very poor. If you call them when facing any problem with their website for the above problem, first thing that would frustrate you would be the amount of time that you will have to wait before someone answers About 4 months ago, if you select an option to speak to CCE, you will be told that the call will be answered in 6 minutes but no one would respond even after 10 minutes. Even otherwise,it takes up valuable time in going through answering all the options on the phone menu. And then even if you select the right options it goes to the wrong person. A lot of time when I called for placing an order when the website is down, it invariably goes to the agent who deals in Cash market and not F&O. From there the guy transfers to the relevant dept. Then again a lot of time goes in verifying yourself even if you have reached there using your TPIN.
3)When you call them for problem that you face on their site, their customer service has a standard answer - "There is a technical problem and it will take 1/2 hour". Lately the disruptions on their website is very frequent, possibly because they may have got more number of users than what it was designed to support.
4) As if their brokerage wasn't high enough compared to it's competitors, from 15th Sep 2008 it increased it further by levying SEBI Turnover Tax, Stamp Duty and Transaction charges levied by the exchange in addition to STT and Serice tax that one was already paying, saying that these new charges were statutory charges which were so far borne by them. These charges exist for more than 3 years now and I always thought that in deciding the brokerage charges, they must've taken this into account. All other players in the market do not charge it separately so far.

So if you area a trader in F&O, I wold not recommend ICICIDirect despite some very good feature like seamless transfer of money and margin against share.
Anyone can suggest who offers the best trading in F&O. I am looking for speed, reliability and good customer care.