The brokers do many wrong things...but clients are no angles....it is impossible for a broker to cheat a client if the clients are vigilant. The clients also do lot of things which are unfair to the broker so , anyone can go to arbitration....client or broker....and the
arbitration committee of a stock exchange has maximum representation of outside people like retired judges, advocates, investor forums, SEBI nominee, Govt nominee....and Arbitration award is binding on the on broker and client.But the very fact that the broker has taken NSE and client to the court so he may have a strong case....the news paper may be reporting one sided story....
I have had experience of 2 national level brokers who tried to do some mischief as under :
1) In one case a trade has been done on my account by a RM .....which resulted into small profit but when I got the contract note, I gave a letter to the broker that these are not my trades, I have not authorised these trades so, take this small profit back and from now on no one from your office is authorised to do a trade unless I give them instructions on phone followed by a fax confirmation on the same day.....and that broker has never done any mischief again.....how many investors will complain when trades by RMs make profits for them ? It is only when the RM makes huge losses, investors cry foul......how many see the contract notes, ledgers every week ?
2) In another case with another broker, I was long in nifty contracts and market was going against me. My terminal hanged and I telephoned this broker to square up my position by selling the nifty contracts which I was holding....I repeated that order 2-3 times and told them clearly that look, I am long so you have to put a sell order....dont make a mistake......they confirmed that they sold...but when the contract came, it showed that they had bought. Now my losses were more than double.....so I took up the matter with them, made them play a tape which recorded my order conversation ( all brokers have to keep this taped conversation as a trail for 6 months......) and recovered the extra loss from the broker...he has to give it...he cannot afford to take confrontation with NSE/SEBI when he is wrong....
Most of the time clients encourage trading by RMs and when RMs make a hole in the account, they say we are cheated.....they get the contracts every day...so if the investors are vigilent, it is impossible for a broker to cheat....The present laws are too good for investors to take care of themselves .
These are money matters, we have to take care of safety of our accounts.We cannot just blame brokers, blame Exchanges, blame SEBI when we have failed to take basic precautions when we are investing/trading.
Smart_trade