ICICI Direct Sucks..!!!!

Yet another day when the ICICI Direct website goes down. Its become all too normal now. And yes, ICICI direct follows Murphy's Law. The site is down whenever you need it.

Suppose its a bullish market and you want to buy stocks, you wouldnt be able to buy.
If the market is crashing and you want to exit, you wouldnt be able to exit.
Market opens at 9.55 am. you would only be able to open your account by 10.45 am.

Infact whenever its works properly, I begin to worry if everythings all right.
I have worked in the IT field before and pretty well know some of the issues that they are facing.

An IT system is built on the models of scalability in the future. You just cannot design a system for today. You have to think of the future and the growth in your customer base. As for ICICI Direct, they have only worked on increasing their customer base and not worked on scaling up their systems and hence all the servers and databases are not able to take the load (the sessions that are created whenever you log into the database ), Once you log in, a session is opened at the database and once that crosses a limit that it can handle, the entire database crashes. If its running at full utilisation its begins to slow down. Now a cause for concern is the initial model that they have built. If you screw this system up, then you are going to have loads of issues when you scale up your system.
From the looks of it their back end systems are pretty screwed up. And am just worried as to how long this will go on. This is because whenever you click on the BUY
or SELL button. There are loads of procedures launched and triggers fired(IT jargon - Dont worry about it). So any screw up in the system could be fatal. A possible example is that you buy the shares, your money gets deducted and no shares get credited to your account. But it would reflect in the back end systems that the shares have been credited. I also saw this on one discussion forum where a guy wanted to buy MFs and the money got deducted but he did anot get any units. In fact i myself tried buying MFs from ICICI Direct and just as i was going to click on the final button, i thought i should see the Terms and conditions. I was shoccked to see that they happily stated the following. "Neither ICICIDirect, nor any of the Mutual Funds shall be liable for any failure to perform its obligations, to the extent that such performance has been delayed, hindered or prevented by systems failures, network errors, delay or loss of data due to the above and in circumstances of acts of God, floods, epidemics, quarantine, riot or civil commotion and war." Just google ICICI Direct sucks and you will get tonnes of stories :) .

Just try calling up the ICICI Direct customer care. You will mostly get the automated reply - Due to the high call volumes we will not be able to take your call.Please call later". A classic example of how if IT systems are not implemented properly it is a disaster in the making.

Anyways....Its another painful day where i want to check my cash projection and i only get the below message. Its been 8 hours since its down.




P.S. - I remember in my earlier workplace our client(telecom player) used to strip us naked in case we asked even for a 4 hour downtime on early monday mornings when there would be no calls to the customer care. And that too these would be maintainance downtimes and not even a system crash like is the case with ICICI Direct. And the best part is - ICICI Direct crashes during market hours. Absolutely inexcusable.

And yeah, if you want to definetly loose money try intraday on ICICI Direct :). Only these people can make you go from a profitable position to a loss making one. Frank advice to all people. Please stay away from ICICI Direct..!!!


GYAN :- For the uninitiated ICICI Direct "provides" online trading services in Stocks, Commodities and Mutual Funds.

Restoring order.....

I thought the best way to get back and try to restore order in the way i go about things was to clean my room first.Have abolutely no idea after how many months i am cleaning it.Started at 4.30 pm and ended at 8 pm. Quite a long and tiring process. Anyways, its the first step towards controlling how i go about my life. Am just currently charting out the things i want to do tomorrow.
Have attached the pics of my room after cleaning :D
Got a few shocked faces from my friends as they entered my room. One even asked if
I was keeping well ...he.he.

Do you control life ..or does life control you ..??

Warning :- Those who dont like the use of explicit language please refrain from reading this.

To start off, am in a pretty fucked up mood as i write this blog. Why..?? Well thats because I have done things that I have decided to stay away from. Things like what i have mentioned in the prior post. And as to the reasons for my fucked up mood, let me just say that things didnt go my way. Its just put a serious question mark on my resolve and focus to do or not do things. Its put me in waters that i have not tested before.. An eery feeling of things not being in control .. a time when life takes control over you.. Well some say, "Its destiny that controls your life"...I just have my middle finger to show the proponents of this theory..Its you who control your life...The thing is I have fucked up..and fucked up big time in the past couple of months.... I have just let myself drift away..

-> I no longer say my morning prayer..a prayer that i used to say every morning from my childhood...
-> No longer do i plan for the next day, in terms of the number of free hours that i have and what best i could do with it...
-> Havent cleaned my room in ages...
-> Had planned many things during the last sem.. Learn photoshop, excel, working on some B-Plans i had in mind,jiving,work on my fitness and tonnes more...

Instead, I havent done a single freaking thing..Just been a blob on this planet...eating away and putting on more tyres .....!!!!

To sum it all .. I have fucked it up...As to why i have gotten enlightenment today.. I dont know...I guess I just feel guilty for not going about life in a way I want it to go ... Another helping factor would be the inspiration I draw from my girlfriend who strives for excellence even in Institutes of Mediocracy...!!!

P.S. - Have attached pics of my room :D

Intra day trading - You gain some, you lose more

There has been lots told about Intraday trading. Most(infact nearly every one) say its a gamble and it only makes your broker richer. Having done significant amount of research about intra day trading, i decided its time to take the next step and try it out. I chose to defy others belief that its a gamble. After all there is a thin line that seperates intelligence from stupidity. ( You get to see this especially in cricket. In case the batsman steps down the track and hits the bowler for a SIX, he is considered an attacking batsman with a lot of courage. And in case he misses the ball and gets stumped, people would say that it was a reckless shot and that it was stupid on his part ) Even so, the other day in my tax class when the teacher was talking about Capital gains tax, a student asked her,"Ma'am what about intraday traders ?". And then with a sarcastic smile she replied,"They make money and lose it too, and in the end they dont pay any tax as they dont make any profits ?". This irked me even more, and increased my resolve to prove that intraday trading was not a gamble if you know how to go about it.

After class, I ran back to my room to prove my point. The pick above is graph of the nifty index today. So based on all the infomation i gathered for the day(about weakness in global indexes) and the familiar pattern that the nifty was charting, I took a short position in 2 scrips at around 12:30. And as expected the market began to slide down and my profits shoot up. With a smile on my face, I was just thinking - "Wish i could show people that Intra-day was not all about gambling". And so me waited and waited for the markets to slide further so that i could maximise my profits.

It was around 14:20 and as i was waiting for the markets to bottom out, the unexpected happened. The market started bouncing back up. And i saw my pot of gold shrink. It shrunk and shrunk and shrunk, till it actually vanished. Infact it ended sligtly in the red. I dont know what made it go up, probably heavy buying by FIIs or MF houses or the unwinding of short positions. But there i was sitting blankly in front of my laptop. The smile of achievement turned into a frown of disgust. And then those voices started playng in my head. I was getting back images of my teachers sarci smile and her comments on intraday trading.

Uff.....In disgust i just shut down my laptop. My mind was forced to accept that its a gamble, but my heart said NO. Well, I guess its because thats how i have been brought up or its just me being me - To question perceptions or beliefs..!! Having said all this, I would be staying way from Intraday and probably even the market itself. Would look more into MFs as a means of investing and just crush those dreams of being the next Warren Buffett. To be more precise, I will be just another drop in the ocean...


GYAN :- For the uninitiated, Intraday trading is the buying and selling of shares on a particular day. The delivery of shares does not happen. Now the interesting thing in intraday trading is that you can make money in a falling market too (its called shorting). Another interesting thing about intraday trading is that you get high leverage, up to 15 times depending on your depository participants.