Top 10 discount brokers in India
After Zerodha was incepted in the year 2010, introducing cheaper flagship brokerage plans and making stock trading accessible to the common man, the Indian stock broking scenario underwent a-massive disruption.
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This outbreak annulled the empire of the traditional stockbrokers and forced them to come up with cheaper stock brokerage plans for maintaining their prowess and giving tough-fight to the ‘newbies’.
This is what led the transition to the present-day discount broking scenario.
With numerous discount stock brokerage firms to choose from offering varied plans with identical platform presence and features it becomes hard for traders to ideally choose the most compatible and appropriate discount brokerage firm.
Today we bring you the list of top 10 discount brokers in India, with a glossary of active customer base to tell you about the market dominance and presence of these firms among the masses.
Zerodha tops the list with over 18 lakh active customers, followed by Upstox with nearly 8 lakh customers and 5paisa with 5 lakh customers. With this, we can easily make out that the top 3 discount brokerage firms have over 1 lakh, active customers.
Discount brokers offer comparatively low brokerage and interactive platforms that facilitate your
trade in stocks, commodities, and other currency derivatives.
These discount brokers have an edge over full-service brokers as the brokerage charged while trading with these discount brokers is comparatively low as compared to the traditional Indian full-service brokers like ICICI Direct, HDFC Securities, SBI cap, etc.
The low discount brokerage levied on trades due to the discount brokers interactive business model where they charge flat brokerage rate for every trade made by their client which does not depends on the size of trades made.
This brokerage levied is usually between Rs 10 or 20 per trade. The full-service brokers, on the other hand, charge a fraction of fees depending on the transaction volume.
This leads to brokerages as high as 0.3-0.7% of the transaction volume. You can easily derive that greater the volume of the transaction, larger will be your brokerage
Rank Broker’s Name Active Clients
Broker Name | Active Client |
Zerodha | 23,46,614 |
Upstox | 7,29,858 |
5paisa | 5,34,655 |
SAMCO | 57,435 |
Alice Blue | 50,803 |
Master Trust | 39,880 |
TradeSmart | 27,104 |
Tradeplus | 16,392 |
SAS Online | 13,621 |
Wisdom Capital | 7,472 |
The ideal stock broker is one that has reasonable brokerage charge, has a low annual maintenance cost, hosts high-quality trade assist tools, boasts of highly responsive customer service, and maintains transparency without levying any hidden account fees.
Also one must prioritise his trading style before opening the trading account with any of the discount brokers.
One must also regularly visit the preferred discount broker’s registered website as the discount brokers have a new campaign going on then and now which is designed as such to bring new customers by offering lucrative bonuses such as zero account opening charges, brokerage cash back, and even referral client’s benefits.
The struggle between discount brokers to emerge out as clear winners is surely benefitting traders in one way or the other.