⏱️ Intraday trading: in and out before 3:30

🎯 In 30 seconds: An intraday trader buys and sells (or sells and buys back) the same shares within one session, 9:15 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. IST, and carries nothing home. In India you must keep at least 20% of the trade value as upfront margin, so the most leverage in shares is about 5 times, and your broker closes anything still open before the bell. It is cheap to start and very hard to do well. SEBI's own study found that 71% of individual intraday traders in shares made a net loss in FY23, and costs made the losers' losses 57% bigger.

The chai stall that must sell out by evening

Think of a chai stall near a railway station. The owner buys milk at dawn and has to use all of it by night, because tomorrow it will be spoiled. Every cup is a small margin. A slow day, a spilled pot or a price hike from the dairy can wipe out the day's profit.

Intraday trading works the same way. You start the day with no position and you must be flat by the close. Every trade aims for a small gain, and every trade pays charges. The difference is that the chai stall sells to customers who want tea. In the market, the person on the other side of your trade is often a professional firm with faster systems and lower costs, who is also trying to make money from you.

What an intraday trade is in India

When you place an order in your broker's app you choose a product type. The names vary a little by broker, but the idea is the same everywhere:

• Delivery (often called CNC). You pay the full amount and the shares come into your demat account after settlement. You can hold them as long as you like.
• Intraday (often called MIS). You promise to close the position the same day. In return the broker blocks only a margin, not the full value. Nothing reaches your demat account, because the buy and the sell cancel out.

If you forget to close an intraday position, the broker closes it for you near the end of the day. This is called auto square-off. Each broker sets its own cut-off time, a little before 3:30 p.m., and many charge a fee for doing it. Check your broker's page for both, because a market order fired in the last few minutes can fill at a poor price.

Intraday also works on the short side. You can sell shares you do not own in the morning and buy them back before the close. You cannot carry that short overnight in the cash market. If you fail to buy back (for example because the stock is stuck at its upper price limit), your sale becomes a short delivery and goes to the exchange's auction, which can be expensive. The details are in Short selling in India.

Margin and leverage: the 20% rule

Before 2020, brokers could offer intraday positions many times larger than the client's cash. SEBI tightened that. Under its circulars on collecting margins in the cash segment (November 2019 and July 2020), brokers must collect margin from clients upfront, before the trade, and are penalised if they collect less. NSE's investor notice from September 2020 put the rule in one line: pay 20% upfront margin of the transaction value to trade in the cash market segment.

The exchanges also check the margin a broker holds for each client several times during the day, not just at the close. That is what traders call the peak margin rule. It was phased in over 2020 and 2021. The effect is that a broker cannot quietly let you exceed your margin in the middle of the day.

What this means for you:

• For the most liquid shares, the required margin is close to the 20% floor, so the most you can control is about 5 times your cash.
• For riskier or less liquid shares the exchange's margin (VaR plus extreme loss margin) is higher, so leverage is lower. Some stocks cannot be traded intraday at all at some brokers.
• Your broker can always ask for more than the exchange minimum.

Worked example (hypothetical). You have ₹20,000. At 20% margin you can buy ₹1,00,000 worth of Sharma Foods Ltd at ₹500, which is 200 shares. If the price falls 1% to ₹495, you lose ₹1,000. That is 5% of your money from a move that happens on ordinary days. A 4% fall costs ₹4,000, a fifth of your account, in one trade.

The shape of an Indian trading day

Normal trading on NSE and BSE runs from 9:15 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. IST, Monday to Friday except exchange holidays. Before that comes the pre-open session: on NSE, orders are collected from 9:00 a.m. to about 9:08 a.m., and the opening price is worked out from those orders by a call auction. Details are in Market hours and settlement.

Most intraday traders think of the day in three parts:

1. The open (9:15 to about 10:15). Overnight news, results announced after the last close and global cues all get priced in at once. Gaps are common, volume is high and prices swing the most.
2. Midday (about 11:30 to 2:00). Volume usually drops. Prices often drift sideways. Many experienced traders trade less here.
3. The last hour (about 2:30 to 3:30). Volume rises again. Intraday positions across the market get squared off, which can cause sharp moves. You also have to be out before your broker's square-off time.

A typical routine before 9:15: check overnight news and exchange announcements, note which companies report results or hold board meetings today, build a short list of liquid stocks with a reason to move, and mark key levels (yesterday's high, low and close).

VWAP: the line most intraday traders watch

VWAP is the volume-weighted average price. It is the average price of every share traded so far today, with each trade counted in proportion to its size. NSE's quote page shows it for every stock, labelled VWAP or average price. It starts fresh each morning.

The formula, using each bar's typical price (high + low + close) / 3:

VWAP = sum of (typical price x volume) / sum of volume

Worked example with three 5-minute bars on a hypothetical stock:

VWAP trails behind the price. The heavy first bar keeps pulling it back toward ₹500. That is the point: it tells you roughly where most of today's shares changed hands, and so whether today's buyers are sitting on gains or losses.

Traders use it as a bias filter. Price holding above a rising VWAP suggests buyers have been in control today. Price below a falling VWAP suggests sellers. Large funds also judge their own buying and selling against VWAP, which is one reason the line can attract price back to it.

Common intraday setups

These are descriptions, not recipes. None of them is proven to make money after costs for a typical trader. Test any of them on paper first.

• Opening range breakout. Mark the high and low of the first 15 or 30 minutes after 9:15. A move above the range high on strong volume is a long signal, a move below the low a short signal. The stop goes on the other side of the range or at its middle.
• VWAP pullback. In a stock trending above VWAP, wait for a dip back to VWAP that holds, then buy with a stop just below it. The mirror image works for shorts below VWAP.
• Gap and go. A stock opens well above yesterday's close after real news, such as results. If it holds above the first 15-minute high, traders buy the continuation. See Breakouts and gaps.
• Gap fade. The opposite bet: a gap on weak news and fading volume gets sold, expecting part of the gap to close. This is a mean reversion trade; see Mean reversion.

Two Indian details matter here. First, many smaller stocks that are not in the F&O segment have a fixed daily price band (2%, 5%, 10% or 20% either way, set by the exchange). If a stock hits its band and only buyers or only sellers are left, you may not be able to get out at all until the next day, which turns an intraday trade into an unplanned overnight one. Second, some brokers restrict intraday trading in stocks under the exchange's surveillance frameworks. Both are covered in The rules every Indian trader runs into.

Every setup needs three numbers decided before you enter: where you get in, where you are wrong (the stop), and how many shares, using risk-based position sizing.

What a round trip really costs

"Zero brokerage" usually applies to delivery, not intraday, and brokerage is only one line on the contract note. Here are the charges on one intraday round trip: buy ₹1,00,000 of shares on NSE and sell them for the same ₹1,00,000 the same day. Statutory rates are as of October 2026; the brokerage is a hypothetical flat ₹20 per executed order.

That ₹83 does not include the bid-ask spread or slippage (getting a worse price than you expected), which are often larger than the charges in less liquid stocks. On 200 shares of a ₹500 stock, the price has to move about 41 paise in your favour just to cover the listed charges.

Now scale it up. With ₹20,000 of margin at 5 times leverage, each round trip is ₹1,00,000 of trade value. Over 21 trading days:

That is the hurdle your skill has to clear every month just to stand still. SEBI's study measured the same thing in real accounts, as the next section shows.

What SEBI found when it looked at real accounts

In July 2024 SEBI published Analysis of Intraday trading by Individuals in Equity Cash Segment. It used client-level data from the top 10 brokers, which held about 86% of individuals trading in NSE's cash segment in FY23, and covered FY19, FY22 and FY23. "Loss-maker" means a net loss after trading costs. The main findings:

• Most lose, and the share is rising. 65% of individual intraday traders were loss-makers in FY19, 69% in FY22 and 71% in FY23.
• Trading more did not help. Among people who made more than 500 intraday trades in a year, 80% lost money. Loss-makers made more trades on average than profit-makers.
• Costs made losses worse. In FY23, loss-makers paid trading costs equal to another 57% on top of their trading losses. Profit-makers gave up 19% of their trading profits to costs.
• Young traders did worst. 76% of traders under 30 were loss-makers, and 81% of those under 20. Traders over 60 had the lowest share, 53%. The under-30 share of all intraday traders grew from 18% in FY19 to 48% in FY23.
• Experience helped, but not enough. Among people who traded intraday in all three years studied, 54% were still loss-makers in FY23.
• Big turnover, still mostly losses. Of traders with more than ₹1 crore of annual intraday turnover, 76% lost money; their average result was a loss of ₹34,977 in FY23.

Two limits of the study, stated fairly: the data is for FY23 and earlier, and it covers clients of the 10 largest brokers, not every trader. As of October 2026 it is the most recent SEBI study of intraday cash trading this course found. The picture in derivatives is worse: SEBI's August 2026 study of the equity derivatives segment reported that 87.7% of individual traders were loss-makers in FY26. That is covered in Getting F&O enabled, and what SEBI's studies found.

Studies from other countries point the same way. In Brazil, researchers followed everyone who began day trading index futures from 2013 to 2015 and kept at it for more than 300 days; 97% lost money. In Taiwan, a small group of top day traders did earn returns after fees year after year, but they were a small minority. Skill exists. It is rare.

A word on tax

For income tax, profit or loss from intraday trading in shares is treated as speculative business income, not as capital gains. Speculative losses can be set off only against speculative income, with their own carry-forward limit, and the rules changed form when the Income-tax Act, 2025 replaced the 1961 Act. The details are in Taxes for traders and investors in India. If you trade often, talk to a chartered accountant before the year ends, not after.

If you still want to try it

Build up in this order:

1. Learn order types well, especially limit orders and stop-loss orders (Order types in depth).
2. Paper trade one setup for at least 20 sessions and record every trade, including charges, in a trading journal.
3. Work out your expectancy after costs (Risk/reward and expectancy). If it is negative on paper, it will be worse with real money.
4. Go live with a small size and no leverage at first: trade only what your cash would buy outright, even though the broker offers more. Keep the daily loss limit.
5. Review monthly against one honest benchmark: what the same money would have earned in a Nifty 50 index fund over the same period.

Try it

Pick one liquid large-cap stock. For ten trading days, open its quote page on nseindia.com at about 10:30 a.m., 12:30 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. and write down the last price and the VWAP (average price) each time. In your notebook, take only paper VWAP pullback trades: write entry, stop and quantity before each trade, and the exit after. Subtract ₹83 for every ₹1 lakh round trip (more if your broker charges more than ₹20 an order). At the end, compute your win rate, average win, average loss and net result after charges. Then pull up one real contract note from your broker, if you have one, and check each line against the cost table above.

Sources

• SEBI: Analysis of Intraday trading by Individuals in Equity Cash Segment (July 2024, PDF)
• SEBI: Profitability of Individual Traders in the Equity Derivatives Segment, FY25 to FY26 (August 2026, PDF)
• NSE circular NSE/INSP/45565 (2 September 2020): Investor awareness on revised margin collection, 20% upfront margin
• Moneylife: Explainer on SEBI's peak margin norms (2021)
• NSE: SEBI turnover fees, STT, stamp duty and other levies
• NSE circular NSE/FA/73061 (27 February 2026): Revision in transaction charges from 1 March 2026
• NSE: Price bands
• NSE: Market timings
• Chague, De-Losso and Giovannetti: Day trading for a living? (FGV EESP working paper)
• Barber, Lee, Liu and Odean: The cross-section of speculator skill, evidence from day trading (PDF)