Dear All,
We shipped Dhan and opened it to everyone in November 2021, and we have come a long way from there. This wouldn’t have been possible without feedback, support, suggestions and criticism included from our users. We take everything positively and go back to the drawing board and either improve, rebuild, ship things that really matter to our users.
As we grow, we have had our share of issues that surfaced as we scale - which our teams have solved for over and again - be it inability to trade in options across strike prices (we expanded our risk policy), margin calculations and blocks (for options trading), from delayed withdrawals to instant (we moved from processing once in a day to 5 times in a day to making instant withdrawals), chart load times (now with upgraded libraries), inconsistencies in P&L (which are fully rectified), historical data (we went live with exchanges by Aug 2021, and had to procure data prior to that which had inconsistencies), app load times on charts (in early March ‘22 when we combined all charting features into one), interest charges on delivery (which we waived off for everyone), margin with pledge experience (which today stands possibly as best in the industry with instant pledge / unpledge across all segments & exchanges including margin for options buying) and so on.
Stock Broking is a complex product and unlike most broking platforms that usually outsource development or use many third party products or components, at Dhan we build from scratch in most of the cases. We have tried to build everything and a lot more in just a year than what our competition has done over the last decade. We have looked up to our users’ suggestions, feedback and support in getting our experience right every time we had a chance to improve on our product, technology, infrastructure, operations or customer service.
We operate a fully open and transparent community, with the intention of building Dhan a better product. Over the time, we had received severe and harsh feedback - all of them still are in this community even now.
Lately we are observing a very odd behavior, especially in the Dhan community, which is more inclined towards trolling and less towards building or helping build Dhan. It breaks our heart to see that; it was never the aim of the community. Before I get there, let me summarize some the issues that are listed here:
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Order execution is slow and takes time: Request to use Thunderbolt button for instant orders. In the newer version of the app, we made it a default action now to avoid confusion for users.
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Order execution on Dhan is slow: We noticed users mentioning us in comparison with other broker apps and also checked for the behavior. On the Dhan app, when users execute their orders, we bring them to the Order trade-book to show the executed order - while on other apps where the comparison was made, it keeps the user on the same screen from where order is placed. We are evaluating if we want to move to that, if it gives a perception of a fast order execution. We are also improving our app refresh rates with coming releases.
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MCX circuit limits not updated: We have identified an issue here - how this data is consumed from other exchanges is different from MCX. The challenge for us remains as the underlying trading systems at MCX itself are getting updated. This is in public domain (https://www.business-standard.com/article/markets/sebi-enhances-vigil-on-mcx-technology-transition-high-court-issues-notices-122121800556_1.html), and we await moving to new trading systems at MCX and participate in mock trading sessions. However we are making changes in the existing system to fix the same even if it means we will have to re-do it all again for new systems.
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MCX spot prices: We have seen users mention this, especially for Crude Oil and Natural Gas. As an exchange member, we only show prices received from exchanges, we may not be able to refer or provide international prices that many refer to.
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Charts, price of orders executed does not reflect on Charts: Charts data is sent by exchanges as broadcast of trades that happen in a snapshot of time, it is never all trade data - just a snap; it is very likely that your trade price was not captured on chart. As a broking platform, we send all orders to exchanges where the order matching and execution takes place. This is true for all order types - Market, Limit, Stop Loss or any order that is executed. Additionally, you can also independently verify all your trades on stock exchanges here: https://www.nseindia.com/invest/first-time-investor-trade-verification
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Charting of candles on Chart: We have written a detailed post on how things work behind the scenes for a charting product (link here - Charts on Dhan: What happens behind the scenes and how Charts work exactly?). What’s more important to know is that an ongoing candle that is built for the current time-frame is based on exchange data in real-time and past candles of that time frame come from data saved on servers. If you refresh an ongoing candle, it will draw it again from exchange data. Some platforms refresh, reset the period and frame of charts where this is not very evident - while we continue to maintain the same settings. All that said, it is a good problem to look at and solve for, we are exploring options here.
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Limitations on TradingView hosted library: We get many requests and feedback to improve experience on our TradingView console (tv.dhan.co) and charts across platforms. Firstly, we would like to clarify that of all stock broking platforms, the charting library on Dhan specifically for TradingView is always the latest. Next, there are limitations of the hosted library, for which it becomes difficult to execute feature requests even if we want to, and additionally TradingView has lots of features that are available for its pro / premium subscribers, that are not available in the hosted versions with us. If users would like to avail some of the pro features there - we would always request to subscribe for that and trade from the TradingView panel by connecting Dhan, it’s an incredibly great product and we are glad to partner with them.
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Connection drops on Dhan web / charts on web: Our trading systems & charting systems on web now connect to thousands of users and maintain concurrent connections over the web. For Dhan we achieve everything in real-time via websockets - a method to maintain two-way communication between your browser and our servers. There are tons of popular softwares like anti-virus, plugins, firewalls, advt blockers, browser extensions or in some cases even ISPs - that try to block websockets in the first place or when a disconnected websocket tries to reconnect. Note that Dhan is a relatively newer web destination that makes an active connection via web sockets, and the instances of these have now significantly dropped - when we get on calls with our users, it helps us understand what is making their connections close or drop.
Beyond the above scenarios, there were two technical issues that happened on Dhan:
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On 19 Jan 2023, one of our leased lines that connects our servers to NSE reset momentarily causing orders to go in-transit mode, which means they did not go to exchanges. We immediately switched that off and moved users to another active line. This affected 61 users in all and as a good-will gesture we reversed all brokerage for these users ourselves on all transactions. The issue was highlighted by our service provider to both us and exchanges immediately and later addressed after market hours.
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On 18 Jan 2023, in market opening hours, one of our charting servers went down and as a result, data on charts went missing. This was resolved within 5 mins of reporting and affected a small set of users. We serve exchange broadcasts & charts from over 40 servers now, and it affected users connected to that particular server for about 5 minutes. Also, note that our exchange transaction systems are different from our charting or other systems, order processing continued to run as usual in this time period.
Coming back to the intent of this post, as mentioned above - we have seen odd behavior on this forum. We have observed the following:
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For every user feedback or suggestion or comment, we try our best to respond to each one of it. There have been times we have requested users to get on a call to explain and share their feedback where we may not have been able to replicate the same. 9 out of 10 times, our genuine users have helped us - there are times where we have understood exact issues and have resolved quickly and there have been times that they take time to get resolved.
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For many users, when we checked on their email addresses, IPs or names - we were surprised to see no trades or even active accounts on Dhan. We understood that these accounts were made anonymously, simply to troll. In some cases, when pointed out - we have seen users delete posts and accounts as well.
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Beyond communicating feedback, suggestions or even reporting bugs, we have seen users sharing the same thing repeatedly, or doubling down with comments that are generic or negative or trolling or in some cases, making personal remarks - this isn’t helping you or us. Ours being a smaller team, it distracts many of us from serving customers who may need genuine assistance.
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We also found instances of users’ anonymous profiles misrepresenting as Dhan team members and responding to posts.
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Dhan operates a fully un-moderated community forum and there is no selection bias to what appears on the Dhan community unlike our competition. However, given the misuse of the same, we will bring in light moderation levels and also introduce community guidelines.
At Dhan, we aim to build and provide the best possible experience for Super Traders & Long Term Investors. We may not be there yet, but our goal is to get there and we believe this will happen only with your support, which is why we are building community and engaging with all our users across platforms.
We are a small group of passionate team members building Dhan. We also have to build against all narratives that get referred to us by our competition directly or indirectly. We just want to clarify a few things out here:
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Adding more features makes Dhan slow: We know products & features that we are building, and we are building everything for scale. Perhaps technology a few years back was limited, now it is not. We have done this earlier, and we build and ship for scale at Dhan.
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Features provided by Dhan won’t work at Scale: We are building and shipping for scale.
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Dhan needs a light-version to make things fast: Dhan is already a light-weight application, yes - a full application that is built with the latest technology stack. If there is a room to make things better, we will definitely do that.
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Dhan’s APIs are not up to mark: We consume the same APIs that we provide to our partners. Dhan APIs are now integrated with 50+ partners and apps including that of large partners like TradingView, Tata Capital, smallcase, GoCharting, Algobulls, and others coming soon. Over 250+ individual users have built their own trading systems on top of Dhan APIs. TradingView recently (just this week) awarded Dhan as the most reliable technology partner amongst all brokers globally. We actively engage with API based algo / system traders (we are on api@dhan.co) to build the next version of Dhan trading APIs.
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Third-Party trading integration like TradingView is not reliable: Dhan is an exchange certified platform and as a practice, we ensure the same levels of certifications are made for all our key integrations, including that of TradingView.
We have a long way to go as a trading & investing platform, we just got started and way too small to counter narratives that go against us. It’s important to clear out and state things as they truly are. It’s odd at times - while our forums are fully open and transparent, other such forums never have negative comments, complaints or issues ever mentioned. That’s ok with us.
Traders & Investors need better products & platforms that help them analyze, inform and trade better and at Dhan we are on it. Let me also use the opportunity to inform you that we are also expanding our infrastructure and underlying connectivity with exchanges, all in advance to ensure we always will have enough capacity and headroom to grow as we scale.
As mentioned earlier, Stock Broking and Exchange systems are possibly one of the most complex ones out there - any changes that Dhan makes to order / transaction execution flows to improve the experience needs repeated testing across exchange mocks that are conducted once or twice a month. Only post that we are able to deploy features to Dhan.
We will continue to ship incremental and incredible features, products and offerings ensuring we are able to deliver a great experience to our users, now and even at scale.
We request all community members to continue with your support on helping us build Dhan in a better way, which has been so far. It only helps us ensure we get the right product experience for you - which is beneficial to all traders & investors. Dhan continues to get better everyday.
Thank you
pj
. The way Dhan Team and especially you personally taking feedback and replying to each and every post is very commendable:pray: .
& especially after connecting to Dhan Community my bonding gets even more stronger 
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here.
everytime I listen to it.
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