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Hello, World – Zerodha, India's largest stock broker

zerodha.tech

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Re: Hello, World – Zerodha, India's largest stock broker

#31

Post by vinay_ys »

knadh wrote: post #15
jayind wrote: post #11

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.

Hey, sorry about that. And we're always sorry about technical issues when they happen, and 9/10 times, they stem from systems outside of our control. 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…

What exactly are the legacy market infra dependencies and what would you replace them with? 8 million trades a day with 1000 messages / second doesn't sound too challenging. But it is besides the point w.r.t the user experience complaints people are raising here.

Re: Hello, World – Zerodha, India's largest stock broker

#32

Post by knadh »

karanke wrote: post #23
knadh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, sorry about that. And we're always sorry about technical issues when they happen, and 9/10 times, they stem from systems outside of our control. 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…

Wait, so what's the problem here? 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?

That makes it sound like the only thing involved in stock broking setup is pushing messages through a line :) Market volatility can cause several hours worth of orders to come through in a single burst. What goes on inside a stock broker is actually incredibly complex. I guess that warrants a long blog post.

Re: Hello, World – Zerodha, India's largest stock broker

#33

Post by knadh »

wadkar wrote: post #5

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. 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)

ERPNext is an amazing piece of FOSS tech that deserves a lot more visibility.

Re: Hello, World – Zerodha, India's largest stock broker

#34

Post by pinfisher »

knadh wrote: post #29
sunu wrote: post #26

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?

Hey, you can turn on biometric 2FA on your smartphone, or use TOTP (Kite web -> My profile -> Password and security). 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.

"The static PIN is a legacy hole that has to be plugged. "

...and probably never will be.

Re: Hello, World – Zerodha, India's largest stock broker

#35

Post by kunalpowar1203 »

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.

>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

Re: Hello, World – Zerodha, India's largest stock broker

#36

Post by dmoy »

> Minimal “AI/ML” for image and document recognition as an aid to operations.

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.

Re: Hello, World – Zerodha, India's largest stock broker

#38

Post by v512 »

smdz wrote: post #21
jayind wrote: post #11

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.

Well that is so true, sometimes the glitches are very consistent across a few days and they take time to acknowledge it or will not acknowledge it. Over a few years I have come to understand what is reliable and what is to be double checked and when it is not reliable. I have ended up with bad order executions because of their buggy Kite Web UI that doesn't update at times. The UX for trading is not professional. Don…

Good luck with that.

Re: Hello, World – Zerodha, India's largest stock broker

#39

Post by v512 »

vinay_ys wrote: post #31
knadh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, sorry about that. And we're always sorry about technical issues when they happen, and 9/10 times, they stem from systems outside of our control. 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…

What exactly are the legacy market infra dependencies and what would you replace them with? 8 million trades a day with 1000 messages / second doesn't sound too challenging. But it is besides the point w.r.t the user experience complaints people are raising here.

You can't send more than x orders in same line unlike traditional network where you can saturate the bandwidth.

Re: Hello, World – Zerodha, India's largest stock broker

#40

Post by kentosi »

ignoramous wrote: post #14

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 easie…

I'm not an expert in trading, but I thought that you could only invest in the indexed/mutual funds available in your country?

I'm not sure your average Indian can, say, start putting money in any Vanguard fund available to Americans.

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