If you ever googled for brokerage firms with online facilities in India, then you might find numerous forums and blogs denouncing and abusing ICICIDirect.com, the company I’ve chosen to trade my stocks through. Most of these accusations date back to 2006-2008 and primarily center around slow speeds and complete shut-downs by ICICIDirect at peak hours. One can even find negative comments posted as recently as May 2009. As regards myself, I opened an account with ICICIDirect in late 2007 and soon saw a 60% depreciation in the value of my purchased shares in 2008. This compelled me to stop trading for over 12 months, until I discovered the stocks rallying back to some respectability a few weeks ago.

I decided to disinvest at the very first opportunity after the UPA was elected back to power in May, and the Sensex had hit the upper circuit twice on the 18th. It became difficult to enter back the market thereafter,  through cash segment, since the markets had seen a 25% rise in the weeks that followed. I decided to trade intraday on margins and further raise my knowledge about stock markets, as a result. ICICIDirect has been functioning pretty well since then, barring a day’s shut down that occurred roughly two weeks earlier, and yes they did screw me up on that occasion, since I eagerly awaited to enter the market before they went kaput. This highlighted the necessity of having more than one trading account for those wishing to trade more frequently.

Though, it is early to say anything about the alleged failures, I’d still rate ICICIDirect decently for having made the whole banking and stock trading experience a user-friendly and smooth one. For me the only worry that kept me busy during the last few weeks was to master the art of intraday trading, and not that of suspecting when ICICIDIrect might ditch me the next.

If you wish to have more information, check out this list of Products and Services they provide. And here is a table of their brokerage charges. Check this out for any confusions about ICICIDIrect functioning, and the stock market basics in general. More about them later in my subsequent posts.

Image courtesy of Niyantha’s photostream on Flickr.

Have you ever been so outrightly frustrated that you chose simply to switch off the main power switch instead of shutting down your PC by pressing the Turn Off Computer button? Yes, I did exactly that this afternoon having spent five tiring hours in trying out my luck at intraday margin trading and finding my whole day’s earnings disappear at the very last moment. It took me a while getting back into my composure, and finally deciding to pour my heart out through this blog post to make something good out of that biting experience.

I have only recently been trading on margin with a view of getting into the groove of stock business and how perplexing this whole experience has been until now. The small capital of 60K Rs that I had started with eleven trading sessions ago lies even more shrunk at 44K tonight, and that too after having deployed all my intellect on making the intraday calls least risky. Although my success to failure ratio stands at 2:1 in terms of my intraday orders, and I believe this would only get better with time, the money earned to lost ratio reversely stands at 1:2 because of a couple of hugely bad decisions I made during the first few sessions, something I’ve been able to avoid lately.

The biggest lesson I’ve learnt by trading intraday is to discard sentiments in such deals. It is much better to lose smaller sums quickly than being indecisive and finding major losses awaiting after bad calls. Sometimes share prices may turn back in your favor, say, after an hour, but this is what you should not lose your heart about and be overtly emotional at. You could easily look for other fluctuating scrips instead of having to sit out for 2-3 hours in sheer blood-pressure and depression.

But, I guess margin trading is not all about awaiting for a sudden rise or a sharp fall in share prices, and one can even place speculative calls by carrying our prior research and leaving it out for the end of the day to decide about your deal’s fate. I do not know how others trade in the intraday segment on margin, but would like to share my own experience about stock market, my brokerage firm ICICIDirect and other such matters from a layman’s perspective. Hope this would help those wannabe stock traders who might visit this weblog hoping to learn about margin trade.