Intraday Trading Strategies for Indian Markets

What Intraday Trading Really Means

Intraday trading is the practice of buying and selling the same stock, index future or option within a single market session, so that you hold no open position once the bell rings at the close. On the NSE and BSE the equity session runs from 9:15 in the morning to 3:30 in the afternoon, with a pre-open call auction between 9:00 and 9:15 that fixes the opening price. An intraday trader is not trying to own a business or collect dividends. The aim is narrower and sharper: to capture a slice of the price movement that happens between the open and the close, and then to walk away flat.

The product type that makes this possible at most Indian brokers is called MIS, short for Margin Intraday Square-off. When you place an order as MIS you are telling the broker that the position will be closed the same day, which lets you put up less margin than the full value of the trade. The trade-off is strict: if you do not exit on your own, the broker will square off the position for you a few minutes before the close, whether you are in profit or in loss. Intraday trading therefore rewards traders who plan their exit as carefully as their entry.

One feature that makes intraday trading flexible is that you can profit in both directions. You can buy first and sell later if you expect a rise, or short sell first and buy back later if you expect a fall, and intraday short selling is permitted even when you do not own the shares, because the position is closed the same day. Delivery investors cannot short like this without holding stock, so this two-way freedom is one of the genuine attractions of trading intraday, as long as the same discipline of stops and sizing is applied to both sides.

This guide walks through the strategies that actually structure a professional intraday day: the opening range breakout, trading around VWAP, the trend pullback and momentum with relative strength. It then covers how the Indian trading day behaves hour by hour, how MIS leverage and auto square-off really work after SEBI's margin rules, what the trade truly costs once STT and GST are counted, and how to size risk so a bad day does not become a bad month. Everything here is for education and skill building. It is not financial advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any instrument.

Is Intraday Trading Right for You?

Intraday trading asks for two things that delivery investing does not: continuous attention and emotional control under speed. Prices move in seconds, stops are hit in real time, and there is no overnight gap to bail you out or to reward your patience. If you cannot watch the screen during market hours, or if a single red number makes you abandon your plan, intraday is a hard place to learn expensive lessons. Many people are far better suited to swing trading or investing, and there is no shame in choosing the style that fits your life.

Be honest about capital too. With a small account, fixed costs and the spread take a large bite out of every trade, so you need either a position large enough for the move to matter or a strategy with a genuinely high win rate. A trader starting with ₹50,000 should expect to risk only a few hundred rupees per trade, which means small absolute profits even on good days. Intraday trading is not a shortcut to quick wealth. It is a skill that, like any craft, pays only after a long apprenticeship of disciplined practice.

There is also a tax and record-keeping reality. In India, profit from intraday equity trading is treated as speculative business income, and profit from futures and options is treated as non-speculative business income, both taxed at your slab rate rather than as capital gains. That means you must keep clean records of every trade. The good news is that you can build all of these habits with zero financial risk on a paper-trading account first, which is exactly what this platform is designed for.

One more practical point: intraday trading needs a stable internet connection, a reliable trading platform, and a quiet routine during market hours. A frozen screen at the wrong moment, or an order that does not go through during a fast move, can cost more than any single strategy earns. Treat your setup, your attention and your health as part of the trade. Tired, distracted or rushed traders make the costly errors that careful ones avoid.

How the Indian Trading Day Behaves Hour by Hour

The intraday session is not uniform. Volatility and volume follow a fairly reliable shape across the day, and knowing that shape is itself an edge. The first fifteen to thirty minutes, from 9:15 to roughly 9:45, are the most violent. Overnight news, global cues and the pre-open auction collide, spreads are wide, and price often makes sharp moves in both directions before it decides. This window produces the best opportunities and the worst whipsaws, which is why many traders wait for the opening range to form rather than trading the very first candle.

From about 9:45 to 11:00 the day's trend often takes shape. Institutional orders work through, breakouts either hold or fail, and the cleaner intraday moves frequently begin here. Then comes the mid-day lull, roughly 12:00 to 1:30, when volume thins as desks step away. Ranges tighten, breakouts turn into traps, and the reward for forcing trades drops sharply. Experienced intraday traders often do very little during this stretch, treating patience as a position in itself.

Activity returns in the afternoon. From around 1:30 the market wakes up again, and the final hour from 2:30 to the close is the second high-volatility window of the day. Positional players adjust, intraday traders begin squaring off, and MIS auto square-off flows add fuel, so trends can extend hard or reverse sharply into the close. The last ten minutes, from roughly 3:20 to 3:30, are dominated by square-off activity and are a poor time to open a fresh MIS position.

A simple rule follows from this map: trade where the volume and the volatility are, which usually means the first ninety minutes and the last hour, and protect your capital during the quiet middle. Forcing trades through a dead market is one of the most common ways intraday accounts bleed out slowly.

Note one caveat: this is a tendency, not a law. Expiry days, major economic data, global selloffs and budget days can keep volatility high right through the lunch hours. The shape of the day is a useful default, but always trade the market in front of you rather than the calendar in your head.

Strategy 1: The Opening Range Breakout

The opening range breakout, often shortened to ORB, is the most popular intraday framework in India for a good reason: it turns the chaos of the open into a simple, rule-based plan. You define the opening range as the high and the low of the first fifteen or thirty minutes of trading. That range captures where buyers and sellers first agreed to fight. A move and close above the range high signals that buyers have won the early battle, and a move below the range low signals the opposite.

The rules are deliberately mechanical. Mark the high and low of the chosen opening window. Enter long when price breaks and holds above the high, or short when it breaks below the low, ideally with a rise in volume to confirm that the move has real participation. Place your stop loss on the other side of the range, and set your first target at one to two times the range width. Skip the trade if the opening range is unusually wide, because the stop distance, and therefore the risk, becomes too large to justify.

Suppose NIFTY forms an opening range between 9:15 and 9:30 with a high of 24,520 and a low of 24,460, a width of 60 points. At 9:42 price pushes to 24,528 on strong volume, breaking the high. An ORB trader could buy a near-the-money NIFTY call or a NIFTY future, place the stop just below the range low near 24,455, and set a first target around 24,580, roughly one range width above the breakout. Because index options are cash-settled and the NIFTY lot size is 65 at the time of writing (the exchange revises lot sizes periodically, so check the latest NSE circular), a 50-point favourable move on one lot is worth ₹3,250 before costs.

The same logic works on liquid stocks. Imagine Reliance opens and prints a first-fifteen-minute high of ₹2,950 and a low of ₹2,920. A break above ₹2,950 offers a long entry with a stop near ₹2,920, a risk of about ₹30 per share, and a target near ₹3,010 for a two-to-one reward. The main pitfall is the false breakout, where price pokes past the range and snaps back. Waiting for a candle to close beyond the range, rather than reacting to the first tick, filters out many of these traps.

• Mark the high and low of the first 15 or 30 minutes.
• Go long on a confirmed break above the high, short below the low.
• Use rising volume as confirmation of the breakout.
• Place the stop loss on the opposite side of the opening range.
• Set the first target at one to two times the range width.
• Avoid trading an abnormally wide opening range.

Strategy 2: Trading with VWAP

VWAP stands for Volume Weighted Average Price, and it is the single most watched intraday reference on a professional screen. It is the average price of the day weighted by volume, which means it reflects the price at which most of the day's business has actually been done. Large institutions use VWAP as a benchmark for execution quality, so price tends to gravitate toward it, respect it, and react around it. For an intraday trader, VWAP works as both a bias filter and a level.

There are two classic ways to use it. The first is directional: when price stays consistently above a rising VWAP, the day favours buyers and you look only for long setups, while price below a falling VWAP favours shorts. The second is mean reversion: in a trending day price often pulls back to VWAP and bounces, offering a lower-risk entry in the direction of the trend with the stop placed just on the far side of the line. Mixing the two without a plan is where traders get hurt.

Take a day when BANKNIFTY opens strong and trades above VWAP for the first hour. Around 10:45 it dips back to VWAP near 52,000 and holds, printing a small bounce candle. A VWAP pullback trader could go long there, place the stop a touch below VWAP near 51,940, and aim for the prior high. With a BANKNIFTY lot size of 30 (lot sizes are revised periodically, so confirm the current NSE contract), a 150-point move is worth ₹4,500 per lot before costs. The key is that you are buying a pullback within an established uptrend, not guessing a bottom.

VWAP works best on liquid, high-volume instruments such as the indices and large-cap stocks, where the average is meaningful. On thin stocks the line is noisy and unreliable. Remember also that VWAP resets each day, so it describes today's auction only. It is a map of where value is being traded right now, not a prediction of tomorrow.

Strategy 3: The Trend Pullback

Most beginners try to catch tops and bottoms. Professionals more often trade pullbacks, because joining an existing trend after a small dip offers a defined risk and a clear direction. The trend pullback strategy is simple in spirit: first identify the intraday trend, then wait for a shallow counter-move against it, then enter when the trend resumes. You are paying a small price in timing to buy confirmation rather than hope.

The common tools are a short moving average such as the 9 or 20 period exponential moving average on a 5-minute chart, or VWAP itself. In a clean uptrend, price will rally, pause, and drift back toward the moving average before pushing higher again. Your entry is the resumption: a bounce off the average with a fresh higher candle. Your stop sits below the recent swing low, so you are risking the distance from entry to that low and no more.

Picture HDFC Bank trending up through the morning, making higher highs above a rising 20 EMA. Around 11:15 it pulls back to the EMA near ₹1,680 and forms a bullish candle. A trend-pullback trader could enter near ₹1,684, place the stop below the swing low at ₹1,672, risking about ₹12 per share, and target the prior high near ₹1,705 for a clean reward-to-risk ratio. The trade asks one question only: is the trend still intact? If the stop breaks, the answer was no, and you are out cheaply.

The discipline that makes this strategy work is refusing to chase. If price has already run far from the moving average, the pullback has not happened yet, and entering there means buying at the worst possible spot. Patience for the pullback is the entire edge. A trend without a pullback is simply not your trade today.

Trend pullbacks fail most often on range-bound days, when there is no real trend to rejoin and every bounce simply rolls over. Before using this strategy, confirm that a trend actually exists, with a clear sequence of higher highs and higher lows, or lower lows and lower highs. On a flat, directionless day, stand aside; the pullback strategy needs a trend to be its engine.

Strategy 4: Momentum and Relative Strength

Momentum trading is the art of buying what is already strong and selling what is already weak, on the simple observation that a stock in motion tends to stay in motion for a while. Intraday momentum trades usually trigger on a break of an important level, such as the previous day's high, a multi-day resistance, or the opening range high, accompanied by a clear surge in volume. The thesis is that the breakout attracts more buyers, who push price further in your favour.

The sharpest version adds relative strength, which compares a stock against the broad index. If NIFTY is flat or slightly down but a particular stock is up two or three percent on heavy volume, that stock is showing relative strength: buyers want it even when the market does not help. When the index then turns up, such leaders often move the most. Relative strength is one of the most underused intraday filters among beginners, who tend to trade whatever is moving rather than what is leading.

Indicators help confirm momentum rather than create it. A rising RSI pushing above 60 supports an upward thrust, while a MACD line crossing above its signal line marks a shift in momentum. The mistake is to treat these as standalone buy buttons. Used well, an indicator simply agrees with what price and volume already show; used badly, it becomes a reason to ignore the chart in front of you.

Imagine a mid-cap stock breaking its previous day's high at ₹540 on volume well above its morning average, while NIFTY barely moves. A momentum trader could enter on the breakout near ₹541, place a stop below the breakout level at ₹533, and trail the stop upward as the move develops rather than fixing a single target. Momentum trades can run far, so trailing the stop is often more profitable than a tight fixed target. The flip side is that momentum can vanish instantly, so the stop must be honoured without hesitation.

Choosing What to Trade Intraday

The instrument you choose matters as much as the strategy. The first filter is liquidity. You want instruments where large volume trades with a tight bid-ask spread, because a wide spread is a hidden cost you pay on every entry and exit. The NIFTY and BANKNIFTY indices, their futures and options, and the most actively traded large-cap stocks such as Reliance, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Infosys and TCS are the natural intraday hunting ground for this reason.

The second filter is volatility, often measured by the Average True Range, or ATR, which tells you how much an instrument typically moves in a period. A stock that barely moves gives an intraday trader nothing to work with after costs, while one that moves in a wide, smooth range offers room for a sensible stop and a worthwhile target. The sweet spot is enough movement to profit from, but not so much wild noise that stops are hit at random.

It also helps to align the instrument with the strategy. The opening range breakout and momentum trades suit instruments that trend and move with conviction, while VWAP mean reversion works best on liquid names that respect the average. A common beginner error is to apply a trending strategy to a quiet, range-bound stock, or a mean-reversion idea to a stock gapping on fresh news. Match the tool to the instrument's typical behaviour, and half the battle is already won before you place the order.

Index derivatives are popular for intraday because they are cash-settled, deeply liquid and not exposed to single-stock news shocks. The exchange revises lot sizes periodically, so always confirm the latest NSE circular before you trade: as a reference, at the time of writing the NIFTY lot is 65 units and the BANKNIFTY lot is 30 units. Weekly index options on the NSE now exist only for NIFTY 50, which expires every Tuesday, and these weeklies attract heavy intraday volume because their premiums move fast. BANKNIFTY no longer has a weekly contract; since November 2024 it trades monthly only, expiring on the last Tuesday of the month, and NIFTY also settles its monthly contract on the last Tuesday.

What to avoid is just as important. Illiquid small-cap stocks, stocks stuck in a circuit limit, and counters with pending corporate announcements are traps for intraday traders, because the spread is wide, exits can freeze, and a single headline can gap the price past your stop. Stick to a short watchlist of liquid names you know well rather than hunting the whole market every morning.

A good practice is to keep a fixed watchlist of perhaps eight to twelve instruments and learn how each one moves: its typical range, how it reacts to the open, and how it behaves around its key levels. Familiarity is a real edge. Trading the same handful of liquid names every day builds the pattern recognition that random screen-hopping never will.

Intraday Trading with Index Options

On this platform and across Indian retail trading, index options on NIFTY and BANKNIFTY are among the most popular intraday instruments, so they deserve a focused word. Index options are cash-settled, meaning there is no delivery of shares; at expiry the difference is settled in rupees, and intraday you simply buy and sell the premium. They are deeply liquid, especially the near-the-money strikes of the nearest expiry, which makes entries and exits clean.

Two forces dominate intraday option premiums: direction and time decay. A near-the-money option premium moves quickly when the index moves, which is why option buyers are drawn to them, but the premium also bleeds value every hour through theta, and that decay accelerates sharply on expiry day. An intraday option buyer who is right on direction but slow to act can still lose, because time is quietly working against the position the entire session.

A simple example shows the leverage and the risk together. Suppose a NIFTY weekly call near the money trades at a premium of ₹120 with a lot size of 65, so one lot costs ₹7,800. If the index moves in your favour and the premium rises to ₹150, one lot is worth ₹9,750, a gross gain of ₹1,950 before costs. If the index stalls or drifts the wrong way, the same premium can fall to ₹90 within an hour, a ₹1,950 loss, even without a large index move, purely from decay and a small adverse drift. The speed cuts both ways.

For these reasons, intraday option buying suits traders who can act fast and cut losses faster, while option selling, which collects that decay, carries its own large risks and margin requirements and is covered separately in our guides. Whichever side you study, treat weekly expiry days with extra respect: the moves are violent, the decay is brutal, and the temptation to overtrade is strongest exactly when discipline matters most.

MIS Leverage and Auto Square-Off Explained

MIS, or Margin Intraday Square-off, is the product type that gives intraday traders leverage. Because the position must close the same day, the broker allows you to control a larger position than your cash alone would normally buy. If a broker offers roughly five times leverage on a liquid stock, then ₹1,00,000 of capital could support about ₹5,00,000 of exposure, which at a price of ₹2,940 is around 170 shares of Reliance rather than the 34 shares full payment would allow. Leverage magnifies both profit and loss in exact proportion.

It is important to understand that intraday leverage in India is far smaller than it used to be. After SEBI's peak margin framework was phased in between late 2020 and September 2021, brokers must collect a standardized upfront margin and are penalised for shortfalls, so the old days of ten to twenty times intraday leverage are gone. For cash stocks the leverage is now modest, and for futures and options the MIS margin is essentially the same exchange-defined SPAN and exposure margin you would post anyway. The practical lesson: never assume large leverage, and check your broker's exact margin for the specific instrument before you trade.

The square-off part of the name is a hard rule, not a suggestion. If you still hold an open MIS position near the end of the day, the broker's risk system will close it for you, commonly around 3:20 in the afternoon for equity cash positions, with derivative cutoffs sometimes a little later. Many brokers charge an auto square-off penalty for doing this on your behalf, and the exit price is whatever the market gives at that moment, which may be poor. The professional habit is to manage your own exit well before the cutoff rather than handing the timing to a machine.

If a trade is working and you decide you want to hold it overnight, you cannot simply leave an MIS position open. You must convert it to a delivery or normal product type, usually labelled CNC for equity or NRML for derivatives, before the square-off window, and you must have the full margin or cash to support the carried position. Converting on a whim is a classic mistake: a losing intraday trade quietly turned into an overnight bet is how small losses become large ones.

What Intraday Trading Actually Costs

Costs decide whether a small intraday edge survives. Every round trip carries several layers: brokerage, which at many discount brokers is a flat fee such as ₹20 per executed order; Securities Transaction Tax, or STT, charged on equity intraday only on the sell side at 0.025 percent; exchange transaction charges; the SEBI turnover fee; stamp duty on the buy side; and 18 percent GST levied on the brokerage, transaction and SEBI charges. None of these is large alone, but together they set a floor your profit must clear.

Consider a realistic round trip: buy 100 shares of Reliance at ₹2,940 and sell at ₹2,955 the same day, a gross profit of ₹1,500. The approximate charges work out to about ₹40 brokerage for two orders, roughly ₹74 of STT on the sell value, around ₹18 of exchange transaction charges, under ₹1 of SEBI fee, about ₹9 of stamp duty on the buy, and roughly ₹10 of GST, for a total near ₹151. Net profit falls to about ₹1,349. These figures are illustrative and vary by broker and over time, but the shape is real: you needed the price to move about ₹1.5 per share just to break even.

Frequency matters as much as the per-trade charge. If a single round trip costs roughly ₹151, then ten round trips in a day cost about ₹1,510, and a trader who scalps thirty times a day can pay several thousand rupees in charges before counting a single loss. High-frequency styles therefore need a high strike rate and tight execution simply to stay ahead of costs, which is why many steady intraday traders deliberately take fewer, higher-quality trades rather than many marginal ones.

Two useful details follow. First, intraday trades do not attract depository participant, or DP, charges, because no shares are actually delivered to or from your demat account; those charges apply only when you sell holdings from delivery, which settle on a T+1 basis. Second, derivatives carry their own rates: STT on the sell side of futures and on option premium differs from the equity rate, and option trades add the bid-ask spread as a real cost, so always model the specific instrument rather than assuming equity numbers.

The takeaway is to treat costs as part of the strategy, not an afterthought. A method that targets tiny moves can be wiped out by charges and the spread even with a high win rate, while a method that targets larger, cleaner moves clears its costs easily. Before you trust any setup, calculate the move it needs simply to break even, and make sure your average winner comfortably clears that bar.

Risk Management: The Real Edge

Strategies get the attention, but risk management is what separates traders who last from those who do not. The first job of an intraday trader is not to predict the market; it is to survive it long enough for an edge to play out across hundreds of trades. That means deciding, before you enter, exactly how much you are willing to lose if you are wrong, and never letting a single trade or a single day threaten the account.

Position size should flow from your stop loss, not from how confident you feel. A sound rule is to risk a fixed small fraction of capital per trade, often one percent or less. If your account is ₹2,00,000 and you risk one percent, that is ₹2,000 per trade. If your stop is ₹10 away from your entry, you can buy 200 shares, because 200 times ₹10 equals your ₹2,000 risk. Change the stop distance and the share count changes with it. This single habit keeps any one loss small and survivable.

Add two more guards. Set a daily loss limit, for example two or three times your per-trade risk, and stop trading for the day once you hit it, because losses cluster and revenge trading turns a bad morning into a ruined month. And think in R multiples, where R is the amount you risked: a trade that makes twice your risk is a plus two R winner, one that hits your stop is a minus one R loser. If your winners average more than your losers, you can be profitable while being wrong nearly half the time.

Here is the arithmetic that should reassure you: with an average winner of two R and an average loser of one R, a win rate of just 40 percent is profitable over time. You do not need to be right often. You need to be right by more than you are wrong, and to make sure no single trade can ever take that math away from you. Protecting capital is the edge that makes every other edge possible.

Stops must be set in the market, mentally honoured, and never widened once price is moving against you. The most expensive habit in intraday trading is dragging a stop further away because you cannot accept being wrong; it converts a planned small loss into an unplanned large one. Decide your exit before you enter, and let it do its job without negotiation.

Building Your Intraday Trading Plan

Consistent intraday trading is built on a written plan, not on mood. Before the market opens, a useful routine is to check global cues and overnight news, mark the previous day's high and low and any major support and resistance, note the levels where you would act, and define your maximum risk for the day. A short, fixed watchlist of liquid instruments you understand beats scanning hundreds of charts in the first frantic minutes.

During the session, follow your rules rather than your impulses. Enter only the setups you defined, size every position from its stop, and write down why you took each trade as you take it. Resist trading the dead mid-day hours unless a clean setup appears. Above all, when your stop is hit, exit without negotiation, because the urge to give a losing trade more room is the urge that empties accounts.

After the close, review. A trading journal that records your entry, exit, stop, size, the setup and your emotional state turns random experience into structured learning. Over a few weeks, patterns appear: perhaps your ORB trades work but your mid-day trades lose, or your winners get cut short while your losers run. That feedback loop, repeated honestly, is how a beginner slowly becomes a trader. A paper-trading account is the ideal place to run this loop with no money at risk.

Keep the plan short enough to actually follow. A single page with your watchlist, your two or three approved setups, your per-trade risk, your daily loss limit and your trading hours is worth more than a thick manual you never open. The aim is a plan so clear that, in the heat of the session, you are simply executing decisions you already made calmly before the open.

Common Intraday Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Most intraday losses come not from bad strategies but from predictable, repeated mistakes. Knowing them in advance is half the cure. The pattern is almost always emotional: a sound plan abandoned in the heat of a moving market, usually to chase a profit or to avoid admitting a loss.

Overtrading and revenge trading deserve special mention because they destroy more accounts than any single bad trade. After a loss, the urge to immediately make it back is powerful and almost always leads to a worse, larger, less considered trade. The daily loss limit exists precisely to break this cycle. When you reach it, the right move is to close the platform and come back tomorrow with a clear head.

Misusing leverage is the other great destroyer. Leverage does not improve a strategy; it only enlarges the outcome, good or bad. A trader who would never risk fifty percent of an account on a delivery trade will sometimes do exactly that intraday simply because MIS made the position size easy to reach. Treat leverage as a tool to be respected, size every trade by its risk in rupees, and the tool stays useful instead of dangerous.

• Overtrading: taking too many trades out of boredom or to win back losses.
• Moving or removing stops because you cannot accept being wrong.
• Oversizing positions with leverage and risking too much on one trade.
• Chasing a move that has already run far from your entry level.
• Trading illiquid stocks with wide spreads and gap risk.
• Ignoring costs and trading for moves too small to clear them.
• Forcing trades during the slow mid-day session.
• Letting an intraday loss turn into an overnight position out of hope.

In intraday trading you cannot control the market, only your size, your stop and your discipline.

Practise Before You Risk Real Money

Everything in this guide is a skill, and skills are built by doing, not by reading. The safest place to build them is a paper-trading account, where you place real strategies against real market behaviour using virtual money. You learn order entry, MIS margin, stops, sizing and the emotional swing of a live position, all without paying for your beginner mistakes with real capital.

Practise deliberately rather than casually. Pick one strategy, the opening range breakout for instance, and trade only that for several weeks, sizing every position from its stop and journaling each trade. Measure your results honestly: your win rate, your average R, and how closely you followed your own rules. Only when a method is consistently positive on paper, across enough trades to be meaningful, does it make sense to consider it with real money, and even then in the smallest size.

Intraday trading can be a rewarding discipline, but it is a profession that punishes the unprepared and rewards patient, rule-based work. Build your plan, respect your stops, count your costs, and protect your capital above all. This article is educational material to help you learn, not financial advice or a recommendation to trade any specific instrument. Use the charts, analytics and paper-trading tools on this platform to turn these ideas into tested, personal experience before a single rupee is ever at stake.

Frequently asked questions

What is intraday trading?

Intraday trading means buying and selling the same stock, future or option within a single market session and closing all positions before the market shuts at 3:30 in the afternoon. The trader aims to profit from price movement during the day rather than from owning the asset. In India this is usually done using the MIS product type, which offers leverage but requires same-day square-off.

Is intraday trading profitable for beginners?

Intraday trading is difficult and most beginners lose money at first, because it demands fast decisions, strict discipline and tight cost control. It can become profitable with a tested strategy, careful risk management and screen experience, but not quickly. The sensible path is to practise on a paper-trading account until your results are consistently positive before risking real money.

What is the best time for intraday trading in India?

The most active windows are the first ninety minutes after the open, from 9:15 to about 10:45, and the final hour before the close, from roughly 2:30 to 3:20. These periods carry the highest volume and the cleanest trends. The mid-day stretch from about 12:00 to 1:30 is usually slow and choppy, and many traders avoid it.

What is MIS in intraday trading?

MIS stands for Margin Intraday Square-off. It is a broker product type for intraday trades that lets you take a position with less margin than the full value, giving you leverage. The condition is that the position must be closed the same day; if you do not exit yourself, the broker squares it off automatically before the close.

At what time are MIS positions auto squared off?

Brokers typically auto square-off open MIS equity positions a few minutes before the close, commonly around 3:20 in the afternoon, with derivative cutoffs sometimes slightly later. The exact time is set by each broker, so check yours. Many brokers also charge a small penalty when they square off a position on your behalf, so it is better to exit on your own.

How much money do I need to start intraday trading in India?

There is no fixed minimum, and you can technically start with a few thousand rupees, but small accounts struggle because fixed costs and the spread eat into tiny profits. A practical starting point is enough capital to risk only about one percent per trade while still taking a meaningful position, often ₹50,000 or more. Most importantly, practise on paper first so you risk nothing while learning.

Is intraday trading taxed differently in India?

Yes. Profit from intraday equity trading is treated as speculative business income, while profit from futures and options is treated as non-speculative business income. Both are taxed at your applicable income-tax slab rate rather than as capital gains, so you must keep clear records of every trade for filing.

What is the opening range breakout strategy?

The opening range breakout, or ORB, uses the high and low of the first fifteen or thirty minutes of trading as the day's opening range. A trader goes long when price breaks and holds above the range high, or short below the low, ideally with rising volume, placing the stop on the opposite side of the range. It is popular because it turns the volatile open into a simple, rule-based plan.