Last week, we highlighted the basic perks of both online and offline trading. This week we bring you a more detailed insight on the major advantages of buying or selling stocks online.

Track the portfolio live

For starters, you can sit in the comfort of your home or office and track your favourite stocks by the second. In an online trading portal, clients can set their own market watch window where stock prices get updated on a real-time basis. By adding stocks to this window, you can look at the bid price/quantity, sell price/quantity, the open, high, low and previous day's close price of stocks.The live ‘market watch' window shows the market depth — the five best buy and five best sell prices of the stocks you have added. Most established brokers also offer intra-day technical charts for their clients. Besides, you don't need to wonder whether your orders went through or not, as reverse messages, which are trade confirmation messages for orders placed, pop-up on the market watch window.

Some online portals provide the order box just below the market watch window. This adds to the convenience of placing orders while observing price changes. You don't have to toggle between windows. While all brokers share ‘hot' trading tips with their clients, there are also those that send intra-day trading tips and positional calls to their client's terminal through pop-up messages. However, you need to be logged in at that time to receive these messages.

Portfolio tracker services, which will at any point in time summarise the state of your investments, is another advantage of trading online . Some brokers add value to it by giving out a sectoral split-up of the portfolio . This will not only help you keep tabs on your investments, but will also come in handy while scrutinising and realigning the company and sector weights in your overall portfolio.

Convenience all the way

Investing in initial public offers and mutual funds can't get easier , especially if you have experienced applying for it offline. Once a complex and time-consuming process, with online trading, it has now become a lot less cumbersome. Just as you would buy and sell securities using your online account, you can also choose to invest in IPOs, NFOs and mutual funds. All you have to do is click the one you wish to subscribe to, key in the price (floor and cap price will be specified) and quantity, and place the order. What's more, as you log into your account, most brokers even flash the list of IPOs on the home screen, making sure you don't miss an investment opportunity! Now that you can now also hold your mutual fund units in the same demat account as shares, expect a lot more relief from handling paper documents. But before you narrow down on the broker, do some sleuthing around to find out about the Fund House tie-ups the prospective e-brokers have.

Disciplined investment

The e-platform allows you to place ‘stop-loss' orders and lets you modify it at any point in time, without the hassle of trying to get through to the phone line of your broker. These orders nonetheless are good only for the day. All open orders (unexecuted ones) get cancelled at the end of day; which means you may have to place fresh orders again the next day.

Another indirect advantage is that you aren't influenced by the sentiments of your fellow traders or dealer, as is the case while trading offline. This may go a long way in disciplining your investment pattern. With only the ticker price and news flow to guide you, the chances of making the right, or at least not–so-wrong investment/trading decisions are higher.

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