Safety of demat capital

[srinihyd]

Hi,
I've been trading for about 4yrs now, part time. I want to increase the capital slowly to trade bigger trasactions.
My question is, how safe is our money with the broker? How far is it possible that the broker takes away the money by way of fraud? I am sure that SEBI must be having strict rules for the brokers, but still?
Do HNI's and big traders also go through brokers like iifl, sharekhan and so on? or do they have their own brokerage houses ?

Thanks,
Srinivas

 

[soft_trader]

As far as demat shares is concerned, ICICI Direct is very safe in my opinion. But their brokerage is very high.