Also there have been much publcised issues with futures trading on their platform, with a court ordering them to refund a large sum to an invester.
There also have been issues with outages:
"Unfortunately, the steep increase in client base and consequent surge in orders has led to several bottlenecks because Zerodha’s infrastructure has not kept pace.
The system conks off often and it is common to find traders expressing their angst against Zerodha, especially on days of high volatility.
Yesterday was a textbook example of this.
The news about hostilities between India and Pakistan led to a sudden surge in volatility.
Traders scrambled to take new positions or cover their existing ones.
However, Kite, Zerodha’s flagship trading system, was down and out.
It stopped taking orders, which is an unthinkable eventuality given the mayhem that was being witnessed in the markets at that time."
From https://rakesh-jhunjhunwala.in/zerodha-held-liable-to-compen...
About spam, we've been working with the capital markets regulators, cyber crime units (Police), and TRAI (telecom regulator). It is a nasty issue that plagues all capital markets institutions in India. I'd gone into some detail on the data leaks on this Reddit AMA last year: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaInvestments/comments/bhv18e/we...
Good that you are taking action on the spam callers and hopefully other improvements have reduced the service interruptions. The regulatory environment possibily does not look with kind eyes on new entrants in the financial services industry. So I think you might have had many struggles to reach where you are.
I really didn't intend to shower negative sentiment about the service, only to highlight a few complaints I have heard, but later I saw it had become the topmost comment.
As an analogy, it is precisely this kind of a distributed tracking and control of spam and DDOS that made cloudflare a valuable service.
This might be only a single anecdotal data point, but I have been using Zerodha for more than a year and I have not received any spam call from any such investment companies. So whatever the spam call issue maybe, I doubt it is Zerodha selling your data.
HN post is going to change that real soon..
That said, I don't get the attractiveness of active-passive stock brokering. Indexed funds (mutual funds) remain a better investment vehicle for the casual passive investor [1] (though some doubt that [2]), as this famous bet [3] and this famous pre-IPO advice to googlers remind us [4].
Don't have a horse in the race, but in India, apart from coin.zerodha; groww.in and smallcase.com are two of the many new-age mutual / indexed fund companies.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12768319
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877700
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20070417031443/http://www.sanfra...
Thought I'd point out that Zerodha Coin, Groww allow for investing in direct mutual funds. On the other hand smallcases are quasi-ETFs. Basically a smallcase is a basket of stocks tracking an idea, theme, strategy, model.
I'm not sure your average Indian can, say, start putting money in any Vanguard fund available to Americans.
It’s a YC funded company too.
>Be extremely wary of technical debt. Know when to scrap and rewrite systems. We have scrapped and rewritten the majority of our stack, including our critical trading platforms, multiple times, improving them significantly with each iteration. These are tough decisions; extremely important trade-offs. Of course, non-interference from non-technical management is incredible luck.
This is what i have always struggled with. I fear the day someone asks me the version of a few web frontend libraries we use. Being debt free from day 1 is a bit farfetched for our industry. So the balance between "work on that tech debt" vs "build new features" always tips towards the latter. The philosophy till now has been to get it working and don't change what ain't broke. But make sure good engineering practices are always in place as much as possible. Still figuring out where and how do i invent time to fix tech debts and/or rewrite something
With small teams your job is to keep the factory lights on as long as possible, till the cash starts flowing predictably. If you have survived long enough for that, then you can think about tech debt.
If yours is a small team and if many things are keeping your team busy - never address a technical debt head on until you can afford the luxury or until the business demands warrant for it. Most engineering team focus too much on technical elegance and go overboard. Rewrite culture can become nasty if unchecked.
Customer onboarding + KYC is a big deal in India and this just surprised me as to how seamless it has become. My earlier "demat" account had simply so many hoops to jump through. Neatly done
I loved this ```Neither large teams for the sake of “growth”, nor 10x ninja developers, are meaningful. What matters is that a group of good developers, no matter how small, are able to work well together.``` As a software developer myself , couldn't agree more. Team members who can put of fires of each other , build really resilient organizations! , in your case it shows
Thank you, for not overhyping an ML deployment, and instead accurately describing the scope and purpose. Also seems like a very good fit for the problem space.
Too many times you'll see that section morphed into some weird marketing technobabble.
I'm really looking forward to the breakdown of much of what has been teased here.
Top of mind: Is Postal the self-hosted transactional mail server (https://github.com/postalhq/postal)? Been looking at using this for an idea, and wanted to know if there are any obvious gotchas to look out for.
Their github issue tracker is pretty active: https://github.com/postalhq/postal/issues/
This was a discussion we had regarding scaling of postal: https://github.com/postalhq/postal/issues/697
On the same line, you should checkout https://listmonk.app/ by @knadh and we use it internally for sending email to our over two million users.
Not sure what you mean by "HTML errors", but apart from these unfortunate incidents stemming from legacy infra dependencies, there are no issues, and we cleared a billion trades last year.
Not sure if you noticed, the volatility over the last two months caused all top five traditional mega-brokers to go down for hours multiple times over several days. Of course, none of this should matter to end users, but I just wanted to say that a lot of these issues in the industry are because of the ageing underlying infra. Thanks.
Also, thanks for the ERPNext.org suggestion - sometimes I wonder how many open source gems I have yet to see. (No, please don't link me to one more awesome-X list :P)
> 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.
Isn't it better to fully rely on Cloud and Infra providers in order to completely avoid such instances?
With Flutter, we initially had a native Android app and a React Native iOS app. Managing two codebases was obviously painful, and React Native had significant performance issues, and we also struggled with the lack of stable libs, and the breaking changes between releases. Flutter came along and we were able to share 90% of the codebase across Android and iOS apps, and were quite happy with 60FPS rendering of native UI.
I've heard a number of people having issues with React Native. I'm curious if that is just an immaturity thing or something more fundamental.
The static PIN is a legacy hole that has to be plugged. Coincidentally, we wrote to the regulator about this exact same matter recently. We'll hopefully see a regulatory announcement mandating "real" 2FA for everyone.
...and probably never will be.
Interestingly, I've learned a lot about Indian operations from your comments regarding this (like telecom operators stealing and selling customer data, etc.). Fascinating!
The underlying infrastructure in the Indian capital markets is very constrained and was not really built for the kind of scale we're operating at in 2020. The next biggest broker processes only a fraction of our daily volumes. So it really is a matter of scale, industry wide.
To give you an example, the leased lines NSE (National Stock Exchange) offers to brokers to send orders take up to four months to commission, and each line has a max capacity of 1000 messages / second. We've been processing close to 8 million trades a day. So you can imagine how painful things can be.
We've been working hard over the years to reduce legacy market infrastructure dependencies and have been making significant progress.
You're processing an average of 1.33 million trades/hour. Let's double that and round up for peak traffic, that's 3 million trades/hour or 833.33 trades/second.
Unless I'm missing something, you only need 1 line. What's the problem here?
It is great that they fixed it immediately after I sent them the details. Thanks to Nikhil Aralimatti (Business Analyst), who promised that the credits will be there in my account EOD. I should have asked if they live near a blackhole, because it looks like their EOD has not yet come for 3 years.
