If the manic day traders of the US are winding down after the great tech meltdown of the past few months, that's not how it happens in India. More and more Indians seem to be clicking in to trading on the internet – 48,042 at last count. That's the number of clients registered for trading through the internet. Every day, an average of 16,000 trades go through on the internet, generating volumes of about Rs 60 crore.

In just a year since investors started logging on to the internet to trade in stocks, the number of trades going through the internet have consistently been on an upward spiral, according to the latest figures with the NSE. In April '00, a meagre 30 trades went through, and the volumes traded through the internet were less than Rs 1 crore, at Rs 0.15 crore per settlement. By mid-December, they were up to Rs 299.24 crore, going up to breach the Rs 300-crore-per-settlement mark in the first week of December. That's just under a 3,000 percent increase in one year.

More than 80,000 trades are logged in through the internet in a single settlement, and what's interesting is that these trades are coming from housewives and young professionals. By December 19, the number of trades logged through the internet were 80,593 - that's about 16,000 trades every day.

Though these numbers are very small compared to the total volumes or the number of trades transacted on the NSE, the number show that Indian investors, despite earlier reservations, are beginning to accept the internet for trading. Currently, only NSE allows investors to trade through the internet, but BSE also has plans to start internet trading soon.

Thanks to stiff competition, e-broking service providers are offering all kinds of value-added services, cut-rate brokerage, and every other kind of add-on to attract investors. It seems to be paying off. There's a not-so-slow but steady rise in the buying and selling that's going through the net.

Several broking outfits are also offering share and cash settlement facilities, which means a paperless process for transactions. Brokerage rates have come down drastically as a result, for there is very little that a broker now does as far as executing a trade is concerned.