How To Do Intraday Trading in India For Beginners

You can start stock intraday trading in India in 2025 if you know the psychology (& science) behind rising and falling markets. Intraday trading relies heavily on price movements. 

Table of Contents

What is Intraday Trading

You Need A Trading Account To Do Intraday Trading in India

Trading Segments for Doing Intraday Trading in India 

#1. Equity Intraday Trading in India

#2. Equity Derivatives Trading in India

#3. Currency Derivatives Trading

#4. Commodity Trading in India

Terms Used While Doing Intraday Trading in India

#1. Margins

#2. Limit Order

#3. Market Order

#4. Stop Loss Order

#5. MIS (Margin Intraday Square off) Order

#6. Bracket Orders (BO)

#7. Cover Orders (CO)

Know Your Trading Platform for Doing Intraday Trading

#1. Funds & Option for Money Transfer 

#2. Sensex and Nifty Tickers

#3. Creating Watchlist

#4. Order Book

#5. Position Book

#6. Holdings Book

How to Place Your First Trade in Zerodha For Intraday Trading

How to Start Intraday Stock Trading in India

Intraday Trading Procedure in the Stock Exchange

Share Trading Tips for Intraday Trading in Indian Share Market

What is Intraday Trading:-

Capturing favorable price movements in a disciplined manner (without being greedy) is critical for making money in day trading. Once you learn this art, you would easily start picking the best stocks for intraday trading in India.

For example, you can buy ACC Cement stock at Rs. 955 and sell it at 960 to capture Rs. 5 profit.

All you need is to be disciplined enough to close the trade at Rs. 960 and not wait (get greedy) for the price to climb to Rs. 965. 

Which unfortunately many people do and lose money because the price moves sharply. Instead of rising to Rs. 965 the prices can move back to Rs. 950 in a few minutes. 

As a beginner, you need to avoid such mistakes while doing intraday trading in India.

Likewise, you can make money even when the stock price is falling. In day trading you can sell the stock first and buy later (it’s called shorting a stock). 

For example, if you predict that shares of Infosys will go down, then you can sell first at Rs. 597 and buy within the same day at Rs. 588, again making a profit of Rs. 9 per share. 

This is what exactly people were doing (shorting) when the stock market crashed due to fear of COVID-19 in March 2020. People made tons of money by selling shares in the beginning and then buying later during the day when the prices have come down substantially.

For example, people were making money using the above technique when the shares of Maruti Suzuki were falling on 23rd March 2020. 

You Need A Trading Account To Do Intraday Trading in India

Demat and Trading accounts help you to access the stock market for stock investing and trading. 

Intraday trading requires a Trading Account and a linked bank account only. But stockbrokers will provide you the option of a Demat account as well so that you can invest long term in stocks. 

If you don’t have Demat & trading account, I would suggest you to open a Zerodha account. I have explained all the steps for trading using the Zerodha account in the later part of the article.

Trading Segments for Doing Intraday Trading in India 

In India, you can do intraday trading in Equity, Equity Derivatives (also called Equity F&O), Currency F&O and Commodity F&O.

#1. Equity Intraday Trading in India

Intraday trading in equity involves buying and selling stocks without the intention to hold the shares for more than a day. You need to square off the trade before the close of the day’s trading session (before 3:30 pm).    

Generally, your broker will ask you to square off all your open intraday trades by 3:20 pm to avoid any trade getting left out. 

You can do intraday trading on shares of known companies listed on BSE and NSE. 

You should pick stocks that are highly liquid, which means there are continuous trades happening for that particular share. This is because you will always have a buyer and seller available for trading when you go to day trade.  

Intraday trades are not allowed on stock banned by the exchanges because of price manipulation. They are categorized as “T” group shares. You should avoid doing intraday trading on banned shares at any cost because they have sudden abnormal price movements.

#2. Equity Derivatives Trading in India

Equity derivatives are available for intraday trading and consist of futures and options (known as F&O) on underlying stocks.

Futures and Options instruments are available on highly liquid stocks. They are selected by stock exchange from the list of top 500 stocks with high market capitalization and traded value. 

If you are interested in options trading then you can read to learn how to start options trading in India for a step-by-step process.

#3. Currency Derivatives Trading

In India, you can trade in currency derivatives on NSE, BSE and MSE (Metropolitan Stock Exchange). The currency market opens at 9 am and closes at 5 pm. 

You can trade in currency futures and options and all the trades are cash-settled in Indian rupees.  

In India, you can trade-in only four currency pairs.

Rupee-Dollar (INR-USD)

Rupee-Pound (INR-GBP)

Rupee-Euro (INR-EUR)

Rupee-Yen (INR-JPY)    

The rest of the currency pairs are not allowed for trading on stock exchanges by RBI. You can trade other currency pairs on the platforms of forex brokers in India.

#4. Commodity Trading in India

You can do intraday commodity trading in F&O on commodity products like metals, energy products like oil & gases and agro-based commodities. 

The exchanges where you can trade commodity F&O are MCX, NCDEX, ICEX, NMCE and ACE. Out of which MCX is the biggest platform.

Agro-based commodities can be traded between 9 am to 5 pm where the trading time for non-agricultural commodities is between 9 am to 11:30 pm.

Terms Used While Doing Intraday Trading in India

Basic terms associated with intraday stock trading that you should know are under.

#1. Margins

Margins are also called leverage in day trading. They help you trade larger volumes by keeping a small amount of money. 

For example, If you want to buy 1000 shares intraday worth Rs. 100. You will need (1000 shares x Rs. 100 per share) = Rs. 1,00,000 in your account. 

Let’s say you have only Rs. 20,000 in your account but your stockbroker is ready to provide the rest of the 80,000 rupees to complete the trade worth Rs. 1 Lakh. 

This means your stockbroker has provided 5X margins. You have a leverage of 5 times on your money.  

#2. Limit Order

Limit order helps you buy or sell stocks at a specific price that you are willing to trade. The trading platform will send your limit order to the stock exchange marking your specified price.

For example, the current market price of TCS shares is Rs. 1680. You already have some TCS shares and you want to sell them at Rs. 1690. 

In such a case, you can enter a limit order specifying your stockbroker to sell TCS shares at Rs. 1690. 

#3. Market Order

Market orders are the current trading price of a stock. When you place a market order for a liquid stock then the buying/selling will happen immediately at the best price available.  

For example, below are the pending buy and sell quotes for ITC shares.

All the BID quotes for ITC shares along with quantity (on the left) are placed by the buyers. If you want to sell ITC shares then the market order (best available price) will be Rs. 207.25 and the quantity available is 93 shares.

All the OFFER prices (on the right) are placed by sellers who are ready to sell ITC shares at their given prices. You can buy 101 ITC shares immediately at Rs. 207.30 by placing a market order. 

#4. Stop Loss Order

Stop-loss order protects you from the risk of continuing a loss trade. Let us understand from the example below.

Suppose, you have bought Reliance shares at Rs. 1100 for intraday trading. Naturally, you will want to sell them higher, let say at Rs. 1108 and book profit.  

But due to adverse market movements, the share price starts to decline and is trading at Rs. 1098. Which means, at the moment you have an unrealized loss of Rs. 2 per share. The price can move down further to Rs. 1090 creating more losses.   

The above loss situation can be prevented by placing a stop-loss order at Rs. 1097.  When you do that, the Stop loss order gets executed at Rs. 1097 booking a loss of Rs. 3 per share. But the stop-loss order protected you from making further losses.  

#5. MIS (Margin Intraday Square off) Order

MIS orders are intraday orders that need to be closed (squared off) before the end of the day’s trading. 

Most stockbrokers square off your open MIS trades at around 3:15 pm unless you convert the outstanding MIS order into delivery orders.  

#6. Bracket Orders (BO)

Bracket order removes risk elements in intraday trading. The Bracket order is designed to lock your profit and losses by creating a price bracket on both sides. 

The system places a target profit order and a stop-loss order as brackets simultaneously with the original buy/sell order. For example, you want to place a buy BO order for Cipla that is currently trading at Rs. 460.

The system will place three order simultaneously as below

Buy order at Rs. 460

Target profit order at Rs. 467

Stop Loss order at Rs. 456

Of course, you will have the option to set the target and stop-loss price but all the three orders will be launched simultaneously under the Bracket Order. 

#7. Cover Orders (CO)

Cover order is a risk-mitigating order in which a stop loss is placed simultaneously with the original buy/sell order. 

For example, if you want to place an intraday buy CO order for HDFC Bank shares that are currently trading at Rs. 860.

The online trading platform will enter both the buy order (at Rs. 860) and a stop-loss order (at Rs. 857) simultaneously to cover your original buy order. You have the flexibility to set the stop-loss orders within the range allowed by your stockbroker. 

Know Your Trading Platform for Doing Intraday Trading

You will receive your user ID and password immediately, once you are done with the demat and trading account opening process. 

Next, you need to visit the trading website (details can be found form the welcome kit or email) of your stockbroker.  

Enter your ID and password to view the trading screen. Initially, the screen will be blank without showing any shares. Few of them may have live Sensex and Nifty prices.  

I am going to share every detail like how to place your trade, how to buy or sell shares, setting watchlist. I used the Zerodha platform to show these details.

You would find various options on your trading platform that you need to explore.