Kotak Securities had stopped onboarding new customers after the December 2022 incident wherein the Neo application didn’t work for 6 to 7 trading hours. In July 2023, the company reactivated the registration form. So now, you can open your demat account with them.
The account opening charges are NIL. While creating an account, you will be prompted to select one of these three subscription types – Trade Free, Max, and Youth. If you are under 30, the Youth plan is for you. If you select this subscription, you will have to pay a fee of 299 for the first year. From the subsequent years onward, you will have to pay 499 Rs every year. Trade Free plan is completely free. The only charges you have to pay are the charges levied by the exchange for placing orders and the AMC fee. The Max subscription will cost you 2499 Rs annually. How is this plan different from the other two? Max unlocks the MTF (Margin Trading Facility) feature of Kotak Neo.
Let’s have a look at the interface and features of Kotak Neo trading/investing app:
Dashboard
The dashboard or main interface of Kotak Securities Neo application looks very clean and attractive. On the left side, there’s the watchlist section. Any orders you place will appear on the right side of the interface. This side also boasts the live status of your order and the current/overall profit and loss. KS enables you to search for orders in your positions/investments. At the top side of the left/right sections, there’s a menu with the following items:
- Home, orders, portfolio.
- Invest, funds.
In addition to the above sub menus, there’s a hidden menu which will appear when you click the profile label. Kotak Securities Neo employs light color theme by default. You can change the color scheme by clicking on this label and then clicking the “dark mode” toggle button.
Floating order window
The floating form for placing order is available in many brokers. To name a few, Zerodha, Dhan, Angel Broking are two such firms that offer this feature.
Kotak Securities Neo application, by default, displays a sidebar when you click the buy or sell button. This button appears when the mouse cursor is on a scrip available in the watchlist. At the top right corner of the form, you will find three vertical dots. When you click the dots, Neo will display a toggle button “Floating order form”.
As the name suggests, the application will display a popup instead of a sidebar when you click this button. Apart from the option to switch from sidebar to popup view for placing orders, another great addition to the Neo app is the toggle option to change the order type. In the older versions of the Kotak Securities app, the order form displayed two buttons – buy and sell. In the latest version of the application, there’s a toggle option to change the order type.
TradingView Pro charts
For a long time, Kotak Neo was powered by the free version of TradingView. A few drawbacks of this were as follows:
- The users were unable to save the modifications made to the chart.
- TradingView free edition can render a single graph only. You must be a Pro user to use the multi chart view feature of the application.
- Free version of the platform lacks indicators that its sibling provides.
Many users kept complaining about the drawbacks I’ve mentioned above. Kotak Securities listened to its users and overcame the limitations by integrating TradingView Pro charting library with its platform.
Watchlists
Kotak Securities Neo application lets users create and manage up to seven watchlists. A watchlist can have as many scrips as you want. You will have to add scrips manually. Some brokers, for example, Sharekhan Espresso can prefill watchlists with scrips belonging to certain index. For example, you can add all nifty 50 scripts to the sidebar with a few clicks of a button. Kotak Neo lacks this feature. The app allows you to filter the scrips in the watchlist by their exchange and sort the stocks in it by the percentage by which their price has changed, name, and last traded price.
Reports
One of the pages traders and investors visit often is “Reports”. Kotak Securities Neo got a better reports module this year. The module renders a chart that shows your overall journey as a trader and investor. It lets you filter the data by year, investment category (bonds, mutual fund, derivatives, currency, and commodity). Kotak Securities Neo Reports page allows users to save the Reports data to a CSV or PDF format file.
Trailing Stop loss
Creating a trailing stop loss is one of the best ways to safeguard your profit or prevent huge losses. TSL is a part of the Kotak Securities Bracket Order feature which is available for intraday orders only. KS Neo doesn’t support market bracket orders. You must choose the limit order type to activate Bracket Order. If you do so, Neo will display a textbox where you must enter the Trailing Stop Loss points. Below this box, you will find a box to enter the target points.
Basket order
Another special feature of Kotak Securities Neo is “Basket order”. BO contains two or more scrips. These scrips will be sent to the exchange when you execute the Basket Order.
Performance
I opened my demat/trading account with Kotak Securities last year. Like many other users, I faced many issues with the application initially. The performance of the web and mobile application has improved after December 2022 (after the company stopped onboarding new customers and focused on improving their infrastructure).
