I am an indian citizen residing in United States for past 9 years. I
have an NRE (Non-Resident External) bank account with ICICI Bank and
this account has been approved under as a PIS account as per RBI
guidlines. I opened this account with ICICI Bank with the sole purpose
of trading stocks in India. Now to be able to trade in indian stock
exchanges, I need to open demat and trading accounts with an offline
broker. I tried to loook up websites of sharekhan, India Bulls, HDFC
securities and Kotak and all of them seem to have tie ups with Axis
bank or HDFC bank for the PIS account. I already have a PIS account
that I opened with ICICI bank. Can someone suggest me a list of offline
brokers that I can work with to create demat and trading accounts?
Please bear in mind that I am in the US and so all communication with
such broker will be mostly via emails, except for submission of
documents and forms which i will be sending by post.
I have done this in past and my experience is that you contact local agents of these brokerage. Earlier I did it with UTI securities now that is acquired by stan chart. But I have faced issues like late order entry or poor communication.
That's exactly the reason I will recommend you that you work with local agent from the place where you belong in India. Arihant capital is another one which worked with.
Due to many manual process it has not been a very good experience for me.
1. You have to send email or IM to your broker. ( that means no official record of your order )
2. Your broker places the order
3. Invoice is sent to your bank ( pis account )
4. You will have to provide power of attorney to bank for releasing money.
After doing this way for long time I have decided to stick with ADR's traded in nyse or just focus on exchange traded funds like IFN, IIF.
But this was 3 years ago. I feel that brokerages might have improved in India hence you might wanna contact them and try again.