Zerodha Tech – Hello, World | Hacker News Reader

Zerodha Tech – Hello, World

zerodha.tech

118 pointsvishnumohandas35 comments

I'm familiar with Zerodha for a completely different reason.

The founder, Nikhil Kamath cheated in a charity chess match vs Indian chess legend Viswanathan Anand. ref: https://hollywoodmash.com/how-chess-world-reacted-to-nikhil-... .

I've avoided the company since. Maybe the tech is great, maybe not, but led by someone who can stoop to cheating when the stakes are so low? No, they cannot be trusted with financial data.

I've noticed that every other broker stoops really low. 5Paisa, Dhan, ICICI, etc. I have opened accounts in all of them for friends and family as per their requirements. Zerodha is definitely the most trustworthy, but lacks even in basic features.

I should make a blog on them someday

Vishy Anand resigning was an absolute GM level move.

From the article: He was scholar's mated a few days earlier, then played with 99% accuracy. What a little man with such a frail ego afraid to look "weak" against one of the best chess players in the world.

India's online trading environment was crazy far behind in the 2000s/early 2010s, and Zerodha grew quickly because of first mover advantage. While stuff they bragged about when the post was written (small team, simple architecture, no product/finance experts) may have initially helped, today they have a terrible reputation for having a buggy app, lack of basic features and no customer support. Other startups like Groww and established banks have now caught up and some of them have surpassed Zerodha in terms of users and trading volume.

I'm actually familiar with Zerodha, as I had read their developer blog about their Flutter mobile app, but no idea why an article back from 2020 is getting traction.

PR in full swing

what exactly is the PR covering here? :-/

Thanks for pointing this out. The title should have [2020].

#zerodha trends frequently on twitter in india for wrong reasons lately.

1.prices lagging compared to other brokers..on live charts 2.orders not showing up on orders page..panicking option sellers whether their order is executed or not. 3.not accountable for late execution of orders causing huge losses.

other platforms are as terrible as well.

These are some serious remarks from an account that was just created.

IANAL, but at least one of these sounds like a thing you / the other people should bring up with the regulator. Would the proper route be to open a complaint case with SEBI instead?

It has been brought up with SEBI. Just search on Twitter. Zerodha and other brokers have paid too I think.

here are couple of quick examples https://twitter.com/amitmittal12/status/1674737715919880192 https://twitter.com/utkarsh_ad50257/status/17280144547917909...

you can find more searching #zerodha

many people complained to sebi but no news of action.

Last month few of my shares disappeared, stock splits gone wrong, disputes appearing for stocks I don't own. The platform was probably the best in India, but it now crumbling.

Groww and upstox are total crap as well. But who cares, majority of the country operates with portfolio sizes of USD 100.

Larger accounts are better off with traditional brokers who offer personal relationships than some app made by a great tech team.

They keep boasting about having a lean tech team, but it is one of the worst things they do.

If you just look at their forum, the average time to complete a feature release is 4.5 years (Eg: SWP, STP (still not released), XIRR in their platforms, Instant withdrawal)

I signed for their products solely after being impressed by their tech blogs and Nadh's writing. After joining, I reported 4 bugs within a week. Their customer support is terrible (replies fast, have to give them that). They keep gaslighting me into believing problems I report don't exist, and then keep closing tickets. They take a week to reply for some tickets, but then close it if you don't reply in a day. Such policies show they are interested in just the metric of tickets "resolved". So I too gave up reporting them. I guess I created too many tickets, and was really annoying them.

I really wanted to enjoy using their products, but am stuck in their sub-par "ecosystem" now due to high costs of moving out (DP charges will be huge due to such a large quantity of unique shares, them holding MFs only in demat meaning I can't switch easily).

Yes even I faced same problem. I wanted to add second bank account but couldn't add due to some technical issue. I raised a ticket with a GIF recording and it was just closed as not reproducible.

Yes exactly!! I made so much effort in recording it, and then they gaslighted me into believing it's a browser issue. Same copy paste reply about clearing cache.

I went so far as to show them network logs from the browser dev tools to show that the delay/bug was on their end.

This is after I explicitly mentioned testing it in Chrome, Firefox, Android, and also my friend's account to rule out any browser/account bug

> (DP charges will be huge due to such a large quantity of unique shares

You directly use CDSL to transfer the shares from one broker account to another broker account.

DP charges are charged by Zerodha then too. In fact, then it is not a fixed amount but a percentage of the total value transferred in that case.

I invest in smallcases so have an abnormally high number of stocks. Stuck in zerodha now

If you close the demat account with Zerodha, you can instruct them to transfer all the stocks to another demat account (open it first with another company). This will be free of cost - I have done it.

Thanks a lot! I am looking into this now. Will create a ticket on their portal. Will be the last ticket I annoy them with hopefully!

But their support article mentions that I have to transfer everything before closing. Are you sure?

The advice appears to be applicable at the time of closing, perhaps as part of closing instructions.

> Hybrid infra. Physical racks where numerous exchange leased lines terminate + AWS. Sometimes, these leased lines go down when the civic body in Mumbai digs up roads.

Goddamit BMC.

The CEO was caught cheating in a Chess tournament.

Thanks for highlighting that! I think in the new economic cycle we should judge companies in a holistic manner, including the CEO’s personality and character because such things often affect how they provide value or screw over customers.

The CEO's brother (and co-founder) was caught cheating. From what I understand he is no longer involved with Zerodha.

He is a director and a "key managerial person". I have heard in a podcast that he is the CFO or CIO (not sure what a broker has a CIO for, so might be wrong)

> We have not received any unsolicited advice asking us to rewrite everything in Rust or Nim (yet).

One wonders if that’s changed since 2020…

2020 article. Amazing nevertheless. I am a huge Kailash Nadh fan.

Despite all the criticism, there are plenty of good takeaways and a 30-member tech team for the scale of the operations, and the size of the organization is impressive.

Key takeaways (for me):

30 people tech team

2 mobile developers

2 front-end developers

2 designers

0 product managers

> 0 product managers

This is the win.

are these 2020 or 2024 figures?

no wonder why the UI sucks.

(2020)

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