Hi @PravinJ , in Nithin Kamath’s recent 15-year Zerodha note, he highlighted their net worth as a buffer against regulatory shocks.
For Dhan, how do you view founder skin-in-the-game and balance sheet strength?
Hi @Rakesh_Roshan Well, if given a choice - I would rather spend time building Dhan and not answer this.
While we have highest respect for Zerodha and Nithin as industry leaders and peers - honestly I fail to understand the point behind the post. It is one point to highlight a metric like net worth, but how does it help against regulatory shocks?
When we were very small, and in instances when traders lost money because of our system glitches - Dhan was the first broker to give money from our own pocket. At that moment, we were loss making, had limited funds from our investors and we faced intense pressure from some of industry peers that we should not have this practice and stop it immediately. This was even before SEBI’s scores mechanism of exchange grievance framework was in place for such issues.
To be in business as a stock broker the framework is decided by regulators and exchanges. There will be businesses who are large enough and have very high revenues at that scale, it is natural that their networth will be high. Zerodha is at that scale after 15 years, and we just got started and under 4 years even today.
About founder’s skin in the game - just because we raised money from investors doesn’t mean we are less passionate about our business or building Dhan. Its kind of in public domain that I was absolutely on the road after my last stint and had no funds, all VCs rejected us. Had to raise money from angels to build Dhan and then later some investors joined us as shareholders in our business. I simply had no choice.
We have a strong balance sheet, and in our small world - we too have more funds with us than the client monies we have most of the times. When regulatory changes came by for Options Trading - yes our business was also affected by 40%. And we know that many industry peers changed their pricing - added AMC, or started charging for Delivery, increased DP charges or Pledge charges, etc etc - I think we were the only broking platform that did no change any price or fees for its customers. Rather as we did well, we also reduced the pricing on MTF to pass on benefits to our users.
Just because we are small, raised capital from investors - does not make us bad or unsafe platform. We will get there someday, and we know that its a long journey for us ahead.
Like I say and believe in - Always believe that something that something wonderful is about to happen 
ps: I once again reiterate, given a choice I would have preferred not to answer this, but when we promise our users transparency - then here is my view. I still didn’t get the point of the post in first place.
@PravinJ that day with your decision to pay for retailers loss due to your glitch, you created a new benchmark in industry that day. Respect for that.
You can get the annual financial statements of any pvt limited company from MCA website by paying a small fee. That way you can get the real worth of the company (not paper valuations).
That was a great gesture from Dhan. Btw I posted that in Zerodha trading qna and I got banned from the platform 
That gesture was so powerful. The competition got worried that they cannot anymore hide behind lazy and dishonest excuses for their glitches.
The point of the post, is sort of try and claim territory and show dominance amongst industry peers, like primals but just in a posh way, and IMO this is show-off at the highest form.
This aside, their platforms are now 99.99% bug free and gives a consistent user experience which I think Dhan should start to work on now, to posh-ify and simplify platforms.
In my opinion, the next 2-3 years will shape the real vision for the broking business and then it would make sense to know the real net worth of the businesses running then. Post-COVID was the new rush of investments and trading where a lot of players came in giving the users what they needed and what they wanted. I hope Dhan continues to stand with the same principles they started with 4 years back.
Commodities markets are live, do you wanna trade? Will you trade today? You haven’t traded for 100 days, you need to trade now.
Or, Make your 101th investment maybe? Such a nice nudge in portfolio.
Aesthetics? That’s so old school. Here’s your bling bling shopping app, with Harvard level UI designers. 
Features? 
/
Implementation & UI? 
/
Me being a hardcore Dhan supporter, am truly disappointed with the botched implementation of many features and the lack of consistency across platforms, not mentioning countless bugs and irritating nudges.
The navigation nightmare continues and the platform instead of getting simpler, is getting overwhelming for me now. But hey, wait, there’s a new product launching next month.
THIS IS MY PERSONAL OPINION. @nitishbangera
Dhan urgently needs to do Bug - - and Fix + +. Traders form a very fluid population. Switch can be fast and furious.
@thisisbanerjee I have my reservations on having so many verticals as well but lately I have made peace with it. I am just focusing on the benefits Dhan as a platform is offering for this financial year to me. When I raise an issue, I implicitly know that it won’t be solved probably in the next 1 year but I atleast have a hope that it will be solved in time. I don’t want to pinpoint every single issue and just seeing what it offers and keep all the noise at bay.
Now even banks are making efforts to give the same performance and user experience so it won’t be far when their apps take over.
@t7support Switch is what will happen. Alot of users including me switched from other apps to Dhan.
Ya same with many of my clients as well (at least order flow volume either paused moving to Dhan or moved what they had here to other brokers). But I will stay with Dhan. Am here to build a long term relationship with Dhan. I hope Dhan will listen and fix the bugs ASAP.
