Buying and Selling Shares.

Buying and Selling Shares.

While from within the country you can use http://icicidirect.com, for NRIs; ICICI provides a sub domain based web address http://nri.icicidirect.com for online trading. You must first transfer the money to your ICICI bank account through a transfer of funds from your resident country, assuming that you do not already have money for use of share trading in your account.
How much money is needed?

This is a question many people ask. There is no fixed figure here. You can buy shares for as small an amount as Rs. 500 (depending on which stocks you buy) or as much as whatever your financial capacity entitles. Understand that money is no constraint here. You can start very small; gradually increase your investment in equities. In fact this is the preferred method when you are new. So that you can understand the dynamics of the market as you increase your investment and make smart moves.

Going back to buying and selling, after you login to your account for the first time, you may need to agree some terms and conditions. Then you can allocate funds through the allocation menu, assuming that you have already transferred money to your bank – DMAT account, Select Non PINS account for primary markets (IPOs) and PINS account for secondary markets (equity purchase). You will be mostly using PINS account.

ICICI support.

You can get help from ICICI in case you are facing any problem or have doubts on how to go about. Their e-mail support is very efficient. You can ask any kind of questions and they will come back with an answer fairly quick.

Once you allocate funds, you can easily buy shares by choosing the ‘buy’ option. There is a simple window that opens up where you have to mention, the stock you like to buy, (find out its code from the 'find stock code' option), the number of shares, and as the third option specify limit or market option.

Market or Limit order:

Market order for a sell or buy means that the order is immediately executed at the current market price of that stock. A limit order means that you are specifying the amount of money you are willing to pay or get (in case of a sell) for that particular stock. For example if the current market price of a share is 100 you can say you are willing to buy it at 99. Such a limit order when placed is queued for execution at the exchange. The moment the price of that share reaches the value specified, the order get executed. If it does not reach the specified value, the order gets cancelled at the end of the market day. Same thing happens if it is a sell order.

Once you confirm your sell or buy order, your order appears on the order book. This is where you can monitor the status of your order. It is then queued and executed (status changes automatically depending upon whether the exchange is trading at that particular time, whether your price can be acceptable for a purchase etc. Examples of status indications are 'queued', 'executed', and 'cancelled' (if you did).

Also, once a limit order has been placed, the system will automatically present you an option to make changes to that order after it had been unsuccessful in executing for a certain period of time. At this stage, you can decide either to modify or cancel your order. If you choose to do nothing, your order will continue to wait until the value specified by you, matches the market value.