The personal portfolio management system which has already reported about 800 registrations from investors, of which, interestingly, 400 are from abroad, provides a unique opportunity to an investor to assess the value of his holdings at any given point of time. The exchange is receiving about 40 registrations per day.

The NSE site, http://www.nse-india.com, seems to have become a craze among surfers with over 150,000 hits being recorded each day. The exchange, however, expects this number to go up to 5 lakh hits a day once it publicises the site. "The response has been absolutely phenomenal. We might even need to deploy two persons to attend to just the Internet services," said an NSE source. The major attraction to the site isundoubtedly the personal portfolio management system. All an investor needs to do is to provide the name of the securities he holds, when he bought them, the price and the number of shares he purchased.

At the click of a mouse he will be told in percentage as well as value terms the rise or fall in the value of his holdings. DBS Internet Services Pvt Ltd, which will be managing the website for NSE for three years, has also decided to add another facility: that of giving the worth of the entire holding of an investor instead of providing it stock by stock.

The other facility available is that of setting off a trigger when the price of a stock crosses a threshold laid down by the investor. For example, the investor may want to sell his holding in a scrip if it quotes below a certain price. He would set this threshold price and be alerted by an e-mail message as and when this threshold is breached.

According to DBS Internet Services director Viraj Savant, an investor sitting anywhere in the world now hasaccess to NSE quotes on a real-time basis with a mere two-minute time delay. "The communication problems for a broker in the case of an investor residing abroad and in far flung areas in India is now passe. The investor can easily track his holdings as well as the rates and get back to the broker through the Net itself and advise him suitably," said Savant.

NSE sources, however, pointed out that this is merely the first phase. In the second phase, one can expect introduction of trading through the Internet itself. "The legal impediments, if any, would have to be seen and capital account convertibility would also need to be in place before this can be done overseas," said the source.

"We are putting in place the infrastructure just like we had done in the case of providing members with V-Sats. When the entire infrastructure is in place, members would be offered space on the web site and this can be utilised by them for various applications," the source added.