Dear All,
It’s been a little over 4 years that Dhan has been around, and ever since, and even before we existed - Dhan has been participating in every mock trading session that are held by stock exchanges. These sessions are usually held on Saturdays.
Of course, it also means on such Saturday that we participate in mock trading - we get messages from our users - reporting glitch or simply making fun of Dhan that markets are live on weekend, and usually these mock trading sessions simulate indices to go either up or down by good points. After years of these messages, we thought why not put our thought process down on a short post and share this with our users.
At Dhan, our mission has always been consistent - to simplify Trading & investing experience for power traders and serious market participants while giving them access to products and platforms that work seamlessly, are transparent, continue to be fast and get faster, and also stay compliant at all the times..
We are still small and early in our journey; but over the years we’ve grown to now have nearly 1 Million active clients as per NSE. We have continuously over the years built all our platforms, ground up from scratch, be it on the backend applications, front-end interfaces, our APIs, or our network infrastructure and connectivity with exchanges. We have made significant investments into it till date, and continue to do more every day.
As many of our users would already know, Dhan is possibly only new-age broker or amongst a few broking platforms that have built their own proprietary trading engines - DEXT in our case. DEXT is widely recognised for its outstanding trade execution, even by the likes of Amazon AWS who have stated that we today are able to execute nearly 40% of all our orders under 10 ms, and nearly 95% of all our orders under 20 ms, This performance is measured by us daily, and we continue to analyse and find ways to optimise this further.
Every expansion in product, technology, platform, applications, network or infrastructure has been driven by one principle - users should be able to rely on our systems completely, without ever worrying about whether they’ll hold up when markets are live. When the underlying platforms, network and applications (in short the plumbing) works flawlessly, investors and traders can focus on what really matters - making better decisions and building wealth.
Living up to that promise we make sure we follow certain rules internally. One such rule is our active participation in every mock trading session conducted by exchanges and rigorously test all our applications, systems and deployments.
Mock trading sessions are simulated market runs organised by exchanges outside regular trading hours. These sessions recreate real market conditions as closely as possible. Order flows, risk checks, clearing processes, and system interactions are all run as if it were a live trading day, allowing every participant in the market ecosystem to test readiness without putting actual capital at risk.
Exchanges conduct these sessions to ensure the market remains stable as it evolves. Whether it’s a regulatory change, a new product framework, an infrastructure upgrade, or a resilience drill, mock sessions act as a safety net. They help uncover issues before they can affect real trading, validate disaster recovery mechanisms, and ensure that systems across brokers, depositories, and clearing corporations behave exactly as they should under load.
For us at Dhan, these sessions play a deeper role. We build, own and manage our own systems rather than relying on third party vendors or partners. Our DNA has always been about moving fast while staying deeply intentional about how things are built.
We have built and shipped our trading engine DEXT, features on order managements like - Super Orders, Trade Plan, Forever Orders, etc; other market based alert systems like - Market Alerts, Data Analysis and Analytics; Risk and Position Managements, Margins, Newer Segments like Renting via SLBM, Instant Pledge and Unpledge, and so much more. Shipping at this pace means our systems are constantly evolving, and every change - big or small - needs to be tested in conditions that resemble real markets as closely as possible.
Mock trading sessions are where that happens. They allow us to test new features, infrastructure upgrades, and performance improvements in a setting that mirrors live trading. They’re also where we rigorously validate our disaster recovery setups and security systems, making sure that if something ever goes wrong, our systems can recover instantly and seamlessly.
Yes, as a result many of you may have noticed charts moving or market-like activity on Saturdays. That’s not accidental. Those moments usually coincide with mock trading sessions, when exchanges are live in simulation mode and we’re connected end-to-end. We also use these windows to observe how the platform behaves under load - how many users log in, how systems scale, and how close that activity comes to a regular trading day. The more participation there is, the clearer the picture becomes, and the better prepared we are for everyday market sessions.
Behind the scenes, mock weeks are intense. Once the Friday trading session ends, teams begin upgrading systems, deploying new builds, and validating changes late into the night. By the time mock sessions start, we’re operating on setups we’d be comfortable trusting during a live market day. It’s not uncommon for us to test features and upgrades that won’t be released for weeks or even months, simply to understand how they perform under realistic conditions.
We also encourage our users to participate in mock sessions in whatever way they normally would—logging in, exploring the platform, placing mock orders, observing market movements. Nothing impacts actual holdings, and all controls remain firmly in place. Yet this participation plays a meaningful role. It helps us understand real usage patterns, strengthens the overall ecosystem’s readiness, and contributes to smoother, more reliable live trading experiences.
Much of what keeps markets stable happens quietly, away from regular trading hours. It happens during mock runs, late-night deployments, and systems being pushed harder than they ever would be on an average day. Participating deeply in these mock trading sessions is simply part of how we operate at Dhan, because reliability isn’t something you talk about when markets are calm - it’s something you earn long before the opening bell.
So next time you see markets open and live outside of regular market hours on a Saturday or otherwise rarely, know that Dhan is participating in mock trading sessions and ensuring that our applications and platforms are being tested out at all times as we scale and take a step forward in our journey.
As always, thank you for placing your trust in Dhan.
Thank you
Alok