If you encounter a technical glitch on your stock broking platform, here’s what you should do

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

stock broking app to place an order for Bank Nifty options, he was taken aback. “On 20 December, the broker’s app had a glitch when I placed some orders for a Bank Nifty option. The app didn’t show anything, whether my orders had been executed or rejected or were pending. My order book and position page didn’t get updated, nor did the funds page,” recounts Patil. Seeing his funds in place, Patil kept punching in his order, but nothing got updated. The order book and position tab got updated only a few minutes later, showing an open position, with a huge loss of Rs.37,000. Patil tried to exit that position, but the error kept recurring.

Patil is not alone in his suffering. Today, more individuals are trading than ever before. A record number of investors have opened demat accounts in the past few years. A staggering 42 lakh new accounts were opened in December alone—50% higher than the previous month—taking the total number of demat accounts to 13.93 crore. The trading volume on stock exchanges has increased over tenfold since 2019-20. However, brokers are finding it tough to handle this frenetic activity. In recent months, users of several broking platforms have been crying foul after facing recurring outages and disruption in services.

Uphill battle for users

According to the official NSE data, brokers reported 16 outages in January alone. In December last year, 15 incidents were observed. The online outrage suggests that all top brokers— Groww, Zerodha, AngelOne, Upstox, ICICI Direct, Kotak Securities, among