Glossary

Your share locker. The broker is only the key, not the locker.

Available only to someone holding a single demat account as sole or first holder, so it is not a way to make a spare second account cheap. The thresholds have been revised more than once, so check the current ones.

Normally free, because the account is being shut. The clean route when you are leaving a broker entirely.

The absolute figure behind delivery percentage. Read it against its own recent average, because the percentage moves whenever turnover moves.

Actually owning the shares, rather than betting on a same-day move.

Separates real buying from intraday churn. An 8% move on 12% delivery means almost nobody wanted to own it.

Charged per stock per day, not per share. It punishes small and fragmented positions hardest.

Start an annual review from the statements, not from memory — memory omits exactly what is worth finding.

The simplest of the three routes abroad. Liquidity can be thin, and the price sometimes trades at a noticeable premium to what it holds.

Brought in after brokers were found misusing client securities, so the protection is real. The cost is that releasing the pledge before a sale is now your operational problem — an unreleased pledge is a short delivery even though the shares are visibly in your account.

Charged per holding, and the reason recorded on the instruction matters — a move between your own accounts is a different thing from a gift or a private sale.

In broking, prefer the narrower DDPI, which permits debits only for settlement, over a broad POA. In family finance, know the limit: Indian agency law treats an agent’s authority as ending if the person who granted it becomes of unsound mind, so an ordinary POA is generally understood not to survive the loss of mental capacity — the very case families buy one for.

It has real value. Letting it lapse dilutes you and pays you nothing.

The investment most Indians own before they open a demat account. Count it as the debt part of your allocation.

Needs a demat account and buys at a live price rather than end-of-day NAV.

What your demat account actually holds is a quantity against an ISIN. The symbol is a label for screens; this is what settlement moves.

The market ends and the ownership does not. The shares stay in your demat account and there is no way to sell them until it is lifted.

One of the few things still done on a physical folio, and a routine reason a dematerialisation request is rejected when the demat account lists the same two names the other way round.