You’ve read up a bit about how to start investing zerodha amc charges  and you’ve saved some money, and you’re finally ready to rake it in on the stock market! But now what? The next step is to get a broker or what is also called a trading DEMAT account which allows you to buy and sell shares.

You have several choices when it comes to opening a Trading account, from bank brokerages like ICICI Direct and HDFC Securities to independent brokerages like Zerodha and Upstox, the sheer number of choices can be overwhelming.

Before we delve into the comparison between Zerodha and ICICI Direct account, a bit about how depositories work. If that does not matter to you, skip this part.

DEMAT depositories

In India you have two depositories, NSDL and CSDL, now these are the folks who are responsible for maintaining the records for various financial securities: Shares, Bonds, Mutual funds etc. These depositories keep records in dematerialized (DEMAT) format, in other words in an electronic format.

But you cannot directly access these depositories, you need an intermediary and they are called Depository Participants (DP), these are the entities which transact on your behalf with the Depositories and make sure every time you buy or sell your shares, it’s recorded with the depository.

Usually, the brokerage firm also happens to be a DP, if they are not, they may use the services of an existing DP.

For instance, in the past Zerodha used to use the services of ILFS which in turn was registered with both NSDL and CDSL the two depositories, now Zerodha is itself registered as Depository participants (DP) with CDSL and hence does not need an intermediary like ILFS.

Now that we’ve got a sense of what is what? Let’s delve into the question – With which brokerage should you open your account?