There is some reports that they sell your contact information to shady investment marketing companies. Many people have observed a sudden influx of calls from small, unheard of investment companies calling them up with investment offers, after they have signed up with Zerodha.<p>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.<p>There also have been issues with outages:<p>"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.<p>The system conks off often and it is common to find traders expressing their angst against Zerodha, especially on days of high volatility.<p>Yesterday was a textbook example of this.<p>The news about hostilities between India and Pakistan led to a sudden surge in volatility.<p>Traders scrambled to take new positions or cover their existing ones.<p>However, Kite, Zerodha’s flagship trading system, was down and out.<p>It stopped taking orders, which is an unthinkable eventuality given the mayhem that was being witnessed in the markets at that time."<p>From <a href="https://rakesh-jhunjhunwala.in/zerodha-held-liable-to-compensate-traders-for-loss-due-to-network-failure/" rel="nofollow">https://rakesh-jhunjhunwala.in/zerodha-held-liable-to-compen...</a>
<i>All of our performance-critical, high throughput services are written in Go. We have not received any unsolicited advice asking us to rewrite everything in Rust or Nim (yet).</i><p>HN post is going to change that real soon..
I like the varsity website: <a href="https://zerodha.com/varsity/" rel="nofollow">https://zerodha.com/varsity/</a>. It has very good educational content on Stocks, Currencies, Commodities Markets, and Investing. I really like the last chapter, Innerworth: <a href="https://zerodha.com/varsity/module/innerworth/" rel="nofollow">https://zerodha.com/varsity/module/innerworth/</a>
Kailash Nadh, zerodha's co-founder, is an active investor as well through the rainmatter startup incubator [0]. There's been quite a boom in the fintech space in India for quite some time now, but zerodha is one of the first generation companies that survived through thick and thin. Indian fintech and edtech companies invite a tonne of interest from YC, in particular, and so, dare I say, the going has got a bit easier in the post-Jio, post-UPI world.<p>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].<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://rainmatter.com/" rel="nofollow">https://rainmatter.com/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12768319" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12768319</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877700" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877700</a><p>[3] <a href="http://longbets.org/362/" rel="nofollow">http://longbets.org/362/</a><p>[4] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070417031443/http://www.sanfran.com/content_areas/home/view_printable.php?story_id=1507" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20070417031443/http://www.sanfra...</a>
This was an amazing read. Thanks for the post. While leading a really small tech team for a fast paced and ever-morphing world of Esports in India, this was a really helpful (It looks like your team plays a lot of CS:CZ. SoStronk is our product #ShamelessPlug). This point of yours caught my attention.<p>>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.<p>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
Was able to a full remote account opening on the platform without a single phone call or courier of any documents<p>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<p>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
> Minimal “AI/ML” for image and document recognition as an aid to operations.<p>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.<p>Too many times you'll see that section morphed into some weird marketing technobabble.
I literally highlighted every paragraph of this post. So many things to agree with.<p>I'm really looking forward to the breakdown of much of what has been teased here.<p>Top of mind: Is Postal the self-hosted transactional mail server (<a href="https://github.com/postalhq/postal" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/postalhq/postal</a>)? Been looking at using this for an idea, and wanted to know if there are any obvious gotchas to look out for.
I hope all the positive replies here are from those who actually used Zerodha themselves over a period of time. When I tried it last year, the website was buggy and even saw HTML errors in response. I moved away to a traditional broker as a result of that.
I have been closely following the progress of Zerodha in such a complex market and also an early customer (not now) for them from the time of its launch. With some of the best competitions around like Sharekhan, 5paisa, and Karvy it was nice to see how they started with zero brokerage concepts like Robin. I did not know it is now the largest stockbroker in India. And really nice to see the tech blog starting. I thought it would be a larger team and using a different tech stack and never expected this. And yes, like-minded developers really add more value to the product
Recently came across Zerodha and had to set it up for a friend. Really good UX, and they've done a good job maintaining with the rapid tech progression.<p>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)
There is also a high-tech stock broker for Chinese/HK/US markets - FUTU[1]. No tech blog yet. They have an open[2] Python API though.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.futunn.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.futunn.com/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/FutunnOpen" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/FutunnOpen</a>
A lot of good tips in there. Thank you for sharing. One thing grabbed my attention...<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.<p>Isn't it better to fully rely on Cloud and Infra providers in order to completely avoid such instances?
If anyone from Zerodha tech team is here, I wonder what's the reasoning behind Zerodha's weird 2FA setup? A static password + a static pin is not really 2FA IMO. What's the problem with supporting standard hardware or app based 2FA that requires an OTP?
Bootstrapped, 10 years old and their tech looks great (from a customer UX perspective). Cool that they’re launching a tech blog. I’ve learned a lot from business engineering blogs over the past decade
Very interesting. I haven't used this but it sounds very impressive. Cool takeaways. Nothing useful to share except that I enjoyed the write-up.<p>Interestingly, I've learned a lot about Indian operations from your comments regarding this (like telecom operators stealing and selling customer data, etc.). Fascinating!
Can you stop using third party trackers like google? I have network wide advt and tracker blocking with PI hole and the events links in the app doesn't load because googletagmanager domain is blocked.
They screw their customers atleast once every month with technical glitches resulting in huge loss for the day traders,who are their major customers..and they are never sorry about it.