Intraday vs delivery charges: MIS, NRML, overnight

Intraday vs delivery charges on ₹1,00,000 of shares

For index options and futures, the product doesn't change the charges. STT on option premium is the same whether you held the contract for ten minutes or ten days.

For shares it changes a lot. STT is Securities Transaction Tax, a tax the government takes on every trade. Take ₹1,00,000 of stock bought and sold at the same price, so charges are the only thing that happens to your money.

Charge	Intraday (MIS)	Delivery
Brokerage	₹20 per order, ₹40 total	Nil (most discount brokers charge none)
STT	0.025%, sell side only: ₹25.00	0.1%, both sides: ₹200.00
Exchange charges (0.00297%, both sides)	₹5.94	₹5.94
SEBI fees	₹0.20	₹0.20
Stamp duty (buy side)	0.003%: ₹3.00	0.015%: ₹15.00
GST (18%)	on brokerage + exchange + SEBI: ₹8.31	on exchange + SEBI: ₹1.11
Total	about ₹82	about ₹222

STT explains nearly all of it. Delivery pays 0.1% on the buy and the sell. Intraday pays 0.025% on the sell only. That's eight times as much on a round trip. Stamp duty is five times the intraday rate too. Skipping brokerage doesn't come close to making up for it.

So a delivery trade has to move further just to pay for itself: roughly 0.22% here, against 0.08% for intraday. Holding shares for a day or two to catch a small move gives you the worst of both. You pay delivery charges for an intraday-sized gain.

These are the rates this app charges. Your broker's brokerage may be different.

Some real costs aren't modelled here. The DP charge is a flat fee of roughly ₹15 to 20 plus GST that your depository participant takes each time you sell a stock out of your demat account. We don't charge it. Dividends and corporate actions aren't modelled either. So if a share goes ex-dividend while you hold it, it will show as a loss that a real account would have made up with the dividend.

How is margin different for NRML carry forward?

Margin is the money your broker blocks to let you hold a position.

If you buy shares or an option to carry, what you paid is what it costs. That number doesn't change while you hold it.

If you sell an option or trade a future, the margin is a percentage of the underlying's notional value, and that notional moves with the index. We covered why in why selling an option needs so much margin. Held intraday, that margin is set once. Carried, it's worked out again against each evening's close.

Say you sell one lot of a Nifty call with the index at 24,500, 75 units a lot, at an illustrative 12%:

24,500 × 75 × 12% = ₹2,20,500 blocked

The next day Nifty closes at 25,000. The margin is re-sized against that close:

25,000 × 75 × 12% = ₹2,25,000 blocked

Now ₹4,500 more of your account is tied up. That's on top of whatever the position lost on the move. Carry a short through a strong trend and the margin climbs day after day, right when the trade is also going against you. In a real account, that's when the margin call comes. Here the new figure is simply blocked, and less of your account is free for anything else.

This app re-sizes margin on shorts and futures only. A long position's cost is never re-marked. What you paid is already spent, and marking it down would hand cash back to an account that had already used it.

Can a stop loss protect you overnight?

A stop-loss is checked on every tick. Overnight there are no ticks.

Say you're carrying a long with a stop at ₹160. The market closes at ₹175, and bad news comes out at 20:00. The position sits open all night with the stop where it was. Next morning the first trade is at ₹140. Your stop is hit, but at ₹140, because that's the first price the market offered. The ₹15 of risk you planned became ₹35.

Stops aren't broken. A real stop-loss order behaves the same way at the open. This is simply the risk of holding overnight: your worst case is the gap, not the stop. For a carried position, size as if the gap will happen, because one day it will. There's more on how stops fill in trailing stop loss explained.

Which positions can't be carried forward?

A short in the cash market. In India you can't sell shares you don't own and hold that short overnight. An undelivered short sale goes to the exchange's auction, with a penalty. So a cash short is always intraday. On our ticket, the carry option simply isn't offered for it.

A contract that expires today. "Carry" means into the next session, and an expiring contract doesn't have one. An option or future on its expiry day is squared off at 15:10, whatever product it was placed as. Carried it for a week and still holding on expiry morning? It closes at 15:10 that afternoon, at the market, like any intraday trade.

There's also a cap on how many positions one account can carry at once. That's a limit of this app, not of the market. Every open position holds a live price subscription for as long as it's open, and those are shared by everyone using the site.

Should beginners practise intraday or delivery first?

If you're learning, start with intraday. It makes you decide every day and it has no gap risk. On shares, the one place the product changes the charges, it's also cheaper. Every trade has a clean start and end, so your record is easier to read.

Practise carrying when you have a real reason to hold, bigger than "it hasn't worked yet". Switching to carry forward at 15:05 because the trade is down isn't a positional trade. It's an intraday loss you've given the whole night to grow. If a trade is meant to be held for days, decide that when you place it, pick the product then, and size it for the gap.

Quick answers

Which is cheaper, intraday or delivery?

On shares, intraday. In our ₹1,00,000 example intraday costs about ₹82 and delivery about ₹222, mostly because of STT. On index options and futures the product doesn't change the charges.

What is the difference between MIS and NRML?

MIS is intraday and gets squared off before the close (15:10 here). NRML is carry forward for futures and options, so you can hold past today, but short margin is re-sized every evening.

What time is intraday square-off?

Here it's 15:10 every day. At most brokers it's somewhere between 15:10 and 15:20, so check yours.

Can I carry a contract past its expiry day?

No. A contract on its expiry day is squared off at 15:10 whatever product you chose.

Figures are illustrative and not investment advice. Lot sizes, margin percentages and charge rates change, so check your broker's.