The Growth of Stock Broking Companies Lures More Retail Investors

The booming stock markets and growing retail investors in equity and share trading
business help Indian stock broking companies to expand their network into more
cities and towns to lure investors into their folds. Experts say the broking business
will continue to grow in future because of the changing economy and the high-quality
performance by the Indian corporate sector. With the entrance of a number of corporate
sectors, no doubt the industry has achieved size and scale.

Many retail investors are also entering new fields of activity such as commodity broking,
mutual fund products and insurance schemes. It has been witnessed in last 6 to 7 years
that the expansion of stock broking companies hit the IPO market to raise funds and
guard the fall of stock broking industry. Many public sector banks are also entering into
this business. While IDBI capital markets, the broking arm of IDBI, is diversifying into
retail broking business, many current players including Kotak Securities, Anagram and
ICICI Direct corner, Motilal Oswal, and Karvy have acquired one fourth of the total
equity market turnover.

India has two big stock exchanges named Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and National
Stock Exchange (NSE) and few small exchanges where shares and equities are traded. An
investor can trade stocks in any of the stock exchanges in India, but all the stock brokers
trade online only in BSE and NSE. They are registered member of the stock exchange
and can register a client to one or more stock exchanges. They take commissions
(brokerages) for their service that vary from broker to broker. An investor has to take the
help of a stock broker to trade stocks because they only can directly buy and sell shares in
Stock Market.

According to a statistical survey, only about 1.1 to 2 per cent of the family income is
routed into the stock markets while the stock markets have been rising by 47 per cent
every year. But Information technology (Stock Market Software) with online stock
trading has minimized the gap by solving problems like location constraints, busy phone
lines, miscommunication etc. of traditional stock trading system. The online trading
is pulling NRI shares due to no manual intervention from stock broker and internet
based stock trading facility across the world. The servers of the online trading portal
are connected to the stock exchanges and selected banks all round the clock. They also
provide updates on the trading and an investor can check the current status of their orders
either through e-mail or the interface used. The only thing to do by the investor is to
register with an online trading portal and get in to an agreement.