14.13 Mobile trading
WHAT IS MOBILE TRADING?
Introduction
Wireless trading or Mobile trading as it is popularly known is soon going to change the whole scenario and experience of trading stock market in India.
The Bombay Stock Exchange created history when it launched mobile trading on Sep 21, 2010. With the introduction of mobile trading, the Indian markets have finally caught up with the markets in the advanced countries. BSE's mobile-based trading facility enables investors to trade on their mobile from any place during trading hours, leading to increase in penetration of the capital markets. The system is easy to access, easy to understand and easy to operate and anyone having a GPRS-enabled mobile handset would be able to trade on BSE through the broker.
The Prospects
Mobile trading is already in vogue in the US, Europe and South-East Asian countries. The share of mobile trading accounts for three per cent of total trading volumes in Japan and South Korea. It is estimated that the share of mobile trading would go up rapidly to 10 percent in a couple of years in these countries.
The burgeoning mobile subscriber base presents a huge opportunity for stock exchanges and other market market intermediaries to expand their business at a rapid pace by taking the capital market to the masses via the ubiquitous mobile phone.
The requirements
First and foremost, one needs to have a hand set which is GPRS-enabled to trade online from the mobile. However, since the since the mobile service is still 2G and 2.5G in India, the speed of execution of trades and stock price updates is rather slow. Once 3G service become fully operative, the video and data transmission would be speedier, which means you can trade really fast.
In mobile trading, the brokers provide the settings to the clients that need to be saved by the clients on their mobile handsets, enabling the clients to access the broker's password. The will enable the clients to access the broker's password. After logging into their account, the investor's can trade online from their mobile phones.
GPRS provides data rates from 56 kilo bits per second (kbps) up to 115 kbps. It can be used for services such as Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) access, Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS), and for internet communication services such as email and access to websites.
The Process
Online trading from the mobile handset would be just like trading on a desktop or laptop with an internet connection. An investor logs on to the broker's websites with the same used ID and password, that he accesses the website from a desktop or laptop. Once logging on to your broker's website, you can track the price of any scrip on both BSE and NSE, view streaming quotes, place a 'buy' or 'sell' orders for any scrip, view order/trade book, track your portfolio and market indices live, view deposits and margins real time. In short, investors can do whatever they can do on their computers. The process of mobile trading is essentially no different from the process of internet trading.
The benefits
Internet trading brought to the investors host of advantages such as increased transparency, reduced cost of transactions due to increased competition, greater liquidity, lower spreads, etc.
With more retail investors participate in mobile trading the penetration is increasing. Thus, Mobile trading enables investors to act fast on information and benefit from it.