Intraday trading

Intraday trading is buying and selling within one session. Every position is closed before the market shuts, so you carry no overnight risk. Indian brokers offer an intraday product type for this, usually called MIS. If you have not closed an MIS position yourself, the broker squares it off before the close. The cut-off time differs by broker and segment, so check yours.

The NSE equity and F&O session runs from 9:15 am to 3:30 pm IST, with a pre-open from 9:00 to 9:15. Bitcoin is different: crypto trades round the clock, so no session close forces you out, and intraday becomes a rule you set yourself, such as closing everything before you sleep.

Intraday matters because time is fixed. A trade that needs three hours cannot be taken in Nifty at 2:45 pm. The first fifteen minutes are fast and wide, the middle of the day is often slow, and the last hour picks up again. Most intraday traders use 5, 15 or 30-minute charts and size the position so one stop-loss is a small, planned part of capital.

The common mistake is converting a losing intraday trade into a carry-forward position to avoid booking the loss. The plan was intraday, the stop-loss was intraday, and now the position faces an overnight gap with no plan at all. Another mistake is overtrading: taking every flicker on a 1-minute chart and letting brokerage and slippage eat the account.