Bad experience with Kotak Securities

To parody an old song:

“Eye eye oh what shall I do, how should I save my skin?”

“I got stuck with Kotak PMS and now look at the mess I’m in!”

I have had a pretty bad experience with Kotak’s PMS. Sadly for me, I got in 2 years ago. A couple of months after I invested, the markets started tanking (and how!). I accept that as systematic risk. But over the past 18 months, returns have consistently remained poor irrespective of whether markets were going south or there was a general spurt in the Indian equity markets. So much for Kotak’s famed research and active management of portfolios!

And now that the portfolio has been liquidated, there is a delay in the proceeds being credited to my account. The cheque should have come in by 7th or 8th July at the latest so that I could have deposited it before 10th and earned interest. As the cheque has yet to reach me, I have suffered interest loss as well as opportunity loss in making fresh investments. SEBI should monitor “T+3″ across the industry, as I suspect there is more violation than compliance- at least in case of retail investors.

I can only rationalize that the “management fees” I paid Kotak Securities each year was towards teaching me a valuable lesson: stay away from Portfolio Management Schemes in general, and Kotak’s PMS offerings in particular. Expensive lesson, I must add.

I would be keen to know if others have had a similar experience with Kotak- or indeed, other such companies as well.