Blog on Financial Topics

Blog - Financials

I am doing trading from last 2 years. I have account with ShareKhan.com which is like industry standard for online trading in India. Frankly speaking  website does not reflect their standard from any angle. The website sharekhan.com is very difficult to understand, the navigation is worst. I am into web application development business from last 6 years and have developed many web applications but the one application I am still confused with is the sharekhan online trading website interface.

I am surprised in the last 2 years they have still not changed interface of their online trading website.

Example of the quality of sharekhan trading website is below. When I was trading on website I saw this "Hello World" message.
And that was the last thing I will expect to see on line trading website where I do all my online transactions :(

Hope sharekhan team will take care of such silly mistakes and try to improve the user interface, so that people like me with average intelligence can use their website.

Comments and suggestions are welcomed :)

Updates: 3rd October 2011

Got call from sharekhan today and they have rectified the javascript alert "hello world".
Good to know that my feedback has helped sharekhan to make there website more userfriendly.

Blog - Financials

I am searching for good pension plan from last 2 years and frankly speaking all the plans i have checked are too complicated. I recently came across one plan called "ICICI Life State Pension Advantage".

I have account with ShareKhan and they called me to promote ICICI policies, strange isn't it.

Any ways, they called be almost 5 times after that i have decided to have a look at what they are offering. My first instruction to them was that i am not interested in any ULIP plans. They have a strange way of marketing ULIP. Its like, if invest Rs. 15000 you will get Rs. 15,00,000 :)

ULIPS are products which are marketed wrongly and marketing people are misleading customers.

Back to Pension Plan.
Basically all the pension plans have two stages

1. Accumullation Phase

2. Annuity/Pension Phase

In Unit liked pension plans like "ICICI Pru Life Stage Pension Advantage" they invest your premium amount in share market/stocks. For this they take FMC, fund management charges which is about 1.35% of the fund value. This any company will charge, its almost standard, as they are managing your funds, FMC is acceptable.

But here is the charges which they tried to hide or you can say tried not to highlight.

Policy Administration Charges

1.1% per month that is 13.2% per annum on the annual premium for 5 years.
That is if i take pay the premium of Rs. 25000 annual then the total Administration charges will be 3300 per annum.

And they take Admin Charges of Rs. 3300 for 5 years that is Rs. 16500 !!!

And for what? For managing my funds? or for paper work? or to make BIG Profit?

I can even put my money in Mutual Funds, there are really good MF out there in market, especially sectoral MF are good.
You can go to moneycontrol.com and go to Mutual Funds section, they will show you top mutual funds there.

So finally i have decided not to go for this ICICI pru Life Stage Pension Advantage.

All comments and advices are welcomed