Guide · Market mechanics
What is the difference between intraday and delivery trading?
The short answer
They are not two speeds of the same activity; they are two different legal and economic objects. In delivery trading you pay the full value and the shares are credited to your demat account on T+1, at which point they are legally yours, with dividends, voting and the right to pledge. In intraday trading the position never settles into your name: the two legs net to zero, nothing reaches the depository, and the broker squares off whatever is still open near the close. What intraday really rents you is leverage for a few hours. Everything else, the margin, the cost and the tax head, follows from that one difference.
Most comparisons stop at "intraday is same-day, delivery is longer". That sentence is true and nearly useless, because the two words name different machineries, not different moods. One of them ends with a real share sitting in your name and the other ends with a cash difference and nothing owned. The choice decides whether anything settles through the depository at all, how much margin the exchange demands before your order is accepted, what the round trip costs, what happens if you do nothing at 3:29 PM, and, the part almost every article omits, which of two incompatible chapters of tax law your profit lands in. This guide walks that machinery in order, and it starts by putting the same rupee into both objects at once.
Not two speeds, but two different objects
Begin with the reframe that the rest of the page rests on. Picture one hundred thousand rupees and one stock, and hold everything constant except the product code on the ticket. Under the delivery code the money buys the shares outright: it pays their full price, and on the next working day they arrive in your demat account as your property. Under the intraday code the same money never buys anything to keep. It posts a margin, controls a larger position for a few hours, and is closed out before the bell, leaving behind only a gain or a loss and no share at all. Same market, same screen, same broker; two entirely different things purchased.
The figure below runs that experiment. It sends an identical two percent price move through both objects and lets the arithmetic speak. On the delivery side, unleveraged, a two percent move is a two percent move on your capital. On the intraday side, with roughly five times leverage, the same two percent becomes a ten percent swing on your capital, and it swings that hard in both directions, because leverage is symmetric and has no opinion about which way you are right. Then the strip beneath shows the second half of the difference that the price move hides: the bill. The cheap object feeds the expensive tax head, and the expensive object feeds the cheap one.
Intraday is not a faster way to buy a share. It is a way to rent exposure to a share you never buy.
One order ticket, two product codes
The exchange does not know your intentions; your broker order ticket does. Every cash-market order carries a product code: an intraday code, often labelled MIS or margin-intraday, and a delivery code, often labelled CNC or cash-and-carry. The code is not decoration. It tells the broker risk system which margin schedule to apply, whether the position may live past the session, and whether your trade will generate a settlement obligation to the clearing corporation at all. Choosing it is the first and most consequential decision of the trade, because it selects the object, not merely the timing.
Under the intraday code the clearing logic is netting. Buy 200 shares at 10:00 and sell 200 at 14:50, and your delivery obligation for that stock is zero: nothing is sent to the depository, nothing touches your demat account, and the only cash flow is the price difference minus charges. This is also why the cash segment lets you short intraday: you may sell shares you do not own at 10:00 provided you buy them back before the close, because only the net position at day-end has to be deliverable. Delivery mode has no such symmetry. You can only sell what your demat already holds, and a buy creates a real obligation, your money against the seller shares, settled through the clearing corporation and completed only when the shares are credited.
The intraday code also carries a built-in deadline, and it is not a courtesy reminder. A position still open late in the session is closed by the broker risk desk, typically in a window from around 3:20 PM, as a market order at whatever price is available, usually with a separate square-off charge. The deadline is structural: your broker has guaranteed the clearing corporation that intraday positions will not become settlement obligations, and it will enforce that guarantee with or without your cooperation. The delivery code makes the opposite promise, that the trade will settle, and so it has no square-off at all; the position simply persists until you choose to sell it.
The delivery rail: T+1, and why the shares land at 3:30 PM
When the delivery code is used, the trade enters India settlement cycle, and that cycle has changed more in four years than in the previous twenty. Indian equities moved to T+1 settlement in a bottom-up rollout that began on 25 February 2022 and completed on 27 January 2023. A genuinely under-reported detail sits inside that sentence: SEBI never actually mandated the switch. It gave exchanges the option of a shorter cycle, and the phased roadmap was designed by the market infrastructure institutions, the exchanges, clearing corporations and depositories, acting jointly. The market went fully T+1 by the exchanges own choice, and SEBI documents still describe the shorter cycle as available on an optional basis, as of 17 July 2026.
The more useful correction is about the time of day. Most guides say the shares "arrive on T+1" and leave it there, which quietly implies the morning. They do not. The SEBI settlement schedule pays in securities and funds by 11:00 AM on T+1, pays out funds to sellers by 1:30 PM, and pays out securities to the buyer by 3:30 PM, which is effectively the market close of that day. That 3:30 PM figure is itself recent: the securities pay-out moved from 1:30 PM to 3:30 PM as a direct consequence of a second reform. Since a rule effective 14 October 2024, following SEBI circular of 5 June 2024, the clearing corporation credits pay-out securities directly to the client demat account rather than routing them through the broker pool. Any guide that still sends your shares through a broker pool is describing the pre-2024 market.
Put the clock and the direct credit together and a practical fact falls out that surprises most new investors. During the trading hours of T+1, from 9:15 AM until close, the shares you bought on T are not yet in your demat account; they are credited only at 3:30 PM. So if you sell them during that T+1 session, you are selling stock you do not yet hold, which is a buy-today-sell-tomorrow trade rather than an ordinary delivery sale; brokers permit it by earmarking the incoming shares, and often show the quantity under a distinct tag until it settles. A separate optional same-day T+0 window has run as a beta since 28 March 2024 and expanded in phases from early 2025, with a T+0 buyer credited around 4:30 PM the same day, but it is a parallel choice for a limited set of stocks, not the default. And to clear up a rumour that circulates on content-farm sites: instant, trade-by-trade settlement is not implemented; it exists only in consultation papers.
| Day | By | What settles |
|---|---|---|
| T | Trade day | You buy. Nothing else settles today; the obligation is only recorded. |
| T+1 | 07:30 | Custodial confirmation reaches the clearing corporation. |
| T+1 | 09:00 | Final obligations are downloaded to members and custodians. |
| T+1 | 11:00 | Pay-in: securities and funds are collected from the market. |
| T+1 | 13:30 | Pay-out of funds reaches the seller. |
| T+1 | 15:30 | Pay-out of securities: the shares are credited to your demat, at the close. |
What actually settles into your name
Ownership is the half of the difference that the price chart cannot show, and it is where "two different objects" stops being a turn of phrase. When a delivery trade completes, a real security enters your demat account under an ISIN, and the Depositories Act, 1996 makes you its beneficial owner, entitled to all the rights and benefits in respect of it. From that credit flow every consequence of ownership: dividends paid to holders on record, bonus and rights issues, the vote at a shareholder meeting, and the ability to pledge the stock as margin collateral. There is no clock on any of it; you hold until you decide to sell. This is the same line that separates trading from investing, and the ownership side is explored in depth in the guide on investing versus trading in India.
The intraday position has none of this, and not by omission but by construction. Because the legs net to zero, no security is ever credited, no ISIN is recorded against your name, and there is nothing in the demat account to pay a dividend on or to vote. What you are left holding is a net rupee difference, a number on a contract note, not an asset. If a company announces a dividend or a bonus during the day, an intraday trader captures none of it, because a record-date entitlement requires a holding at the depository and the intraday trader never has one. The figure sets the two side by side: a share in your name against a cash difference with nothing behind it.
Margin: what you are really renting
The folk memory of intraday trading includes leverage of ten or twenty times capital. That market ended with SEBI peak-margin framework, introduced by the circular of 20 July 2020 and phased to full force by September 2021. Since then, margin is collected upfront, before the trade, and verified through random intraday snapshots, so a broker cannot quietly fund your position until evening. The leverage did not vanish, but it was capped and made honest, and the cap is what makes intraday an object you rent rather than one you own.
In the cash segment the upfront requirement is the stock VaR plus ELM, its value-at-risk margin plus extreme loss margin, subject to a floor of 20 percent of trade value, whichever is higher. For a liquid large-cap that arithmetic caps intraday leverage near five times, the figure the hero used; for volatile or illiquid names the VaR component pushes the requirement higher and the leverage lower. A delivery buy posts the same upfront margin at order time, but the resemblance ends there: you must bring the full purchase value by pay-in on T+1, because ownership is transferring and the seller must be paid in full. Intraday capital is a deposit against one day of adverse movement in a position that will not exist tomorrow; delivery capital is the price of the asset. One quiet compensation sits on the delivery side, and it ties back to ownership: once the shares are yours, they can be pledged to your broker as collateral, so the asset itself becomes a source of margin, something an intraday position, owning nothing, can never offer. The mechanics of that deposit, and how a haircut and a pledge turn holdings into buying power, are covered in the guide to margin trading in India.
Renting leverage is not free of consequence just because the deposit is small, and the regulator numbers on the most leveraged corner of the market are a fair warning. According to SEBI, about 93% of individual traders in equity derivatives made net losses over FY22 to FY24, aggregate net losses exceeding ₹1.8 lakh crore (SEBI, September 2024). Intraday equity is the cash segment, not derivatives, and carries less leverage than an options book; but the lesson transfers cleanly, because it is a lesson about what borrowed exposure does to an ordinary run of outcomes. Leverage widens the distribution on both sides. A small deposit is capacity, and capacity used without a plan is precisely how the manageable becomes the ruinous.
The tax fork: one profit, two chapters of law
Here is the difference that outlasts every trade, and the one most intraday-versus-delivery articles skip entirely. Indian tax law does not ask how long you held a stock first; it asks whether delivery happened. Section 43(5) of the Income-tax Act defines a speculative transaction as one settled otherwise than by actual delivery. An intraday equity trade is the definition made flesh: the buy and sell cancel, nothing is delivered, and so the profit is speculative business income, not a capital gain at all. The classifier is the same event that decides ownership, which is why the two threads of this page are really one thread.
The consequences are structural. Speculative business income is taxed at your slab rate, whatever that is, with no concessional rate available. Its losses are quarantined by Section 73: a speculative loss can be set off only against speculative gains, never against salary, never against capital gains, never even against ordinary business income, and it can be carried forward for at most four assessment years. Delivery profits live in a different chapter. For listed equity on which STT is paid, a holding of twelve months or less produces short-term capital gains taxed at 20 percent under Section 111A; beyond twelve months, long-term capital gains taxed at 12.5 percent under Section 112A, after an annual exemption of ₹1.25 lakh. Those figures come from the Finance (No. 2) Act, 2024 and apply to transfers on or after 23 July 2024; any article quoting 15 and 10 percent is quoting the repealed schedule. Capital losses have their own silo under Section 74, short-term losses offsetting either class of gain, long-term losses only long-term gains, with an eight-year carry-forward. Both silos share one procedural trap: carry-forward is allowed only if the return was filed by the due date. The full picture, with the return forms, sits in the guide to trading taxation in India.
One more thing dates almost every tax explanation now online. The Income-tax Act, 1961 itself stands repealed: the Income-tax Act, 2025 replaced it on 1 April 2026, renumbering the code. The speculative-versus-capital fork carries forward into the new Act; the section numbers around it do not, so treat any guide citations, including the 1961 numbers used here for recognisability, as pointers into the old code that the new law re-enacts. As with every figure and threshold on this page, these are stated as of 17 July 2026, and a tax position on real money should be confirmed against the current Act and your own facts.
| Question | Intraday (speculative business) | Delivery (capital gains) |
|---|---|---|
| Classification | Speculative business income, s.43(5) | STCG up to 12 months; LTCG beyond, s.111A and s.112A |
| Rate | Your slab rate, no concessional rate | STCG 20%; LTCG 12.5% above the ₹1.25 lakh exemption |
| Loss set-off | Only against speculative gains, s.73 | STCL against STCG or LTCG; LTCL against LTCG only, s.74 |
| Carry-forward | 4 assessment years | 8 assessment years |
| Condition to carry forward | Return filed by the due date, s.80 | Same condition, s.80 |
| Return form | ITR-3, business schedules | ITR-2, where there is no business income |
The cost asymmetry, in rupees
The statute also prices the two objects differently, and the asymmetry runs opposite to intuition: the object you hold longest is the expensive one per trip. Securities transaction tax on delivery equity is 0.1 percent on both legs; on intraday it is 0.025 percent, sell side only. Stamp duty, uniform nationally since 1 July 2020 and charged to the buyer, is 0.015 percent on a delivery buy against 0.003 percent intraday. Add the exchange transaction charge, 0.00307 percent per side on the NSE cash segment under the schedule effective 1 March 2026 (the older 0.00297 percent figure is stale and omitted the investor-protection component beside it), the SEBI turnover fee of 0.0001 percent, GST at 18 percent on brokerage and those charges, and, for delivery only, a depository charge when shares leave your demat. Price a round trip of ₹1,00,000 each way, at a flat ₹20 per executed order as brokerage, and the two objects separate cleanly.
Run the arithmetic before believing any of it. Intraday: brokerage ₹40 across two orders, STT of ₹25 on the ₹1,00,000 sell leg, exchange charge about ₹6.14 on ₹2,00,000 of turnover, SEBI fee ₹0.20, stamp ₹3 on the buy, and GST of about ₹8.34 on the brokerage and charges: roughly ₹83, or about 0.041 percent of turnover. Delivery: the same brokerage and levies, but STT of ₹200 across both legs, stamp of ₹15, and a depository charge on the sell day: roughly ₹293. That depository charge is worth a note, because it is where brokers vary most. The depository bills your broker a flat fee per debit, on the order of ₹3.50 to ₹4.00, but what you pay is set by the broker, commonly ₹15 to ₹25 per stock per selling day, and the gap is pure commercial markup. The per-trip toll is only half the story; the arithmetic of a strategy that repeats the trip dozens of times a week, where these tolls become the dominant force, is worked through in the guide to scalping and the cost per round trip.
Where these numbers come from. The rates are the statutory and exchange schedules in force as of 17 July 2026: STT under the Finance (No. 2) Act 2004 table as amended, stamp duty under the Indian Stamp Act since 1 July 2020, the NSE cash transaction charge of ₹307 per crore per side effective 1 March 2026, the SEBI turnover fee of ₹10 per crore, and GST at 18 percent on the broker fee and the levies but not on STT or stamp duty. The site cost estimator applies exactly these figures; verify any charge on your own contract note, since brokerage and depository markups are commercial, not statutory.
Where each object breaks, and who each is for
The failure modes differ as much as the mechanics, and they are the clearest guide to which object a given trade belongs in. Intraday failures concentrate at the close. The auto square-off is a market order placed at a time you did not choose: in a liquid large-cap that is a rounding error, in a thin counter it is slippage stacked on a forced exit. Worse is the position that cannot be squared off. A stock locked at its lower circuit has no buyers, so a long cannot be sold and rolls into a delivery obligation you must fund in full; a short that cannot be bought back becomes a failed delivery and goes to the exchange auction settlement, where the buy-in price is out of your hands and routinely punitive. The intraday code caps your holding period; it does not promise the market will let you obey it.
Delivery failures are slower and mostly self-inflicted. The position that was "just for a few days" survives a bad result because nothing forces an exit, and the holder discovers that the absence of a square-off deadline is also the absence of enforced discipline. Overnight and weekend gaps land at the 9:15 open with no chance to act in between, which is the risk you accept in exchange for owning the asset. And at filing time comes the paperwork failure this page exists to prevent: reporting intraday results as capital gains because they happened in the same account as delivery trades. The classifications are not interchangeable, the loss silos do not communicate, and a return built on the wrong head invites notices, not refunds. The table compresses the whole comparison, and it deliberately contains no winner.
| Dimension | Intraday | Delivery |
|---|---|---|
| What settles | Nothing; the legs net to zero inside the session | Shares to your demat by 15:30 on T+1, funds to the seller |
| What you own | A net cash difference; no share, no ISIN | A real share in your name at the depository |
| Capital required | Upfront margin: VaR + ELM, minimum 20% of value | Full purchase value by T+1 pay-in |
| Ownership rights | None; no dividend, bonus, vote or pledge | Dividends, bonus, rights, voting, can be pledged |
| Shorting | Allowed: sell first, buy back before the close | Not available; you sell only what you hold |
| Holding limit | Hard stop: broker square-off from ~15:20 | None; hold until you choose to sell |
| Overnight gap | Never faced | Faced at every open, unhedged by stops |
| Cost per ₹1,00,000 round trip | ≈ ₹83, but recurs with frequency | ≈ ₹293, paid once per position |
| Tax head | Speculative business income at slab | Capital gains: 20% short, 12.5% long above ₹1.25 lakh |
| Typical failure | Forced market exit into a thin or circuit-locked close | Unplanned holding through gaps; misfiled tax head |
Notice what the table does not contain: a better object. The two are not rungs on a ladder from timid to brave; they are different machines that reward different preparation and demand different things of the person trading them. Intraday concentrates every risk into hours and asks for attention, fast decisions and an iron respect for the square-off, the kind of session discipline set out in the guide to an intraday strategy and the anatomy of the session. Delivery stretches risk across nights and asks for patience, position sizing and the temperament to hold an owned asset through a gap. Which object a given trade belongs in, decided before the order is placed, from the setup expected duration, the stop distance and the tax consequence, is a planning question, and that upstream work is exactly what the method we teach is built around.
The conversion cut-off. Moving a position from the intraday code to delivery is routine, but it is a request, not a right: it needs the full purchase value in the account and must happen before the broker cut-off, which precedes the square-off window. Discover a margin shortfall at 3:18 PM and the choice is no longer yours. Remember too that a converted trade settles by delivery, so its result is a capital gain or loss, and it leaves the speculative silo for good.
Common Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the real difference between intraday and delivery trading?
+They are not two speeds of one activity; they are two different legal and economic objects. In delivery trading you pay the full value and the shares are credited to your demat account on T+1, at which point they are legally yours, with dividends, bonus issues, voting and the right to pledge. In intraday trading the position never settles into your name: the buy and sell net to zero inside the session, nothing reaches the depository, and the broker squares off anything still open near the close. What you are really renting in intraday is leverage for a few hours. Everything else, the margin, the cost and the tax head, follows from that one difference.
Do I actually own the shares in intraday trading?
+No. Because an intraday buy and sell of the same quantity net to zero, no delivery obligation is created, nothing is sent to the depository, and no share is ever credited to your demat account. You never become the beneficial owner. What you receive or pay is only the net price difference, less charges. Everything ownership carries, dividends, bonus and rights issues, voting and the ability to pledge the stock for margin, exists only on the delivery side, where a real share sits in your demat in your name.
When do shares actually reach my demat account after a delivery buy?
+By 3:30 PM on T+1, the working day after the trade, which is effectively the market close of that day. The SEBI settlement schedule times pay-in at 11:00 AM, pay-out of funds by 1:30 PM and pay-out of securities by 3:30 PM on T+1, and since a rule effective 14 October 2024 the clearing corporation credits those shares directly to your demat account rather than through the broker pool. A practical consequence follows: during T+1 market hours the shares are not yet in your account, so selling them that day is a buy-today-sell-tomorrow trade rather than a normal delivery sale.
Did SEBI make T+1 settlement compulsory?
+Not exactly, and this is widely misstated. SEBI gave exchanges the option to offer a shorter T+1 cycle; it did not mandate a switch or lay down a phased roadmap. The bottom-up rollout that ran from 25 February 2022 and completed on 27 January 2023 was designed by the market infrastructure institutions, the exchanges, clearing corporations and depositories, acting together. In other words the Indian market went fully T+1 by the exchanges own choice rather than by regulatory fiat, and SEBI documents still describe the shorter cycle as available on an optional basis.
Is intraday trading income speculative business income?
+Yes. Section 43(5) of the Income-tax Act defines a speculative transaction as one settled otherwise than by actual delivery. An intraday equity trade is exactly that: the buy and sell cancel inside the session and no shares are delivered, so the profit is speculative business income. It is taxed at your slab rate, not at capital gains rates, and under Section 73 its losses can be set off only against other speculative gains, with a four-year carry-forward. The classification turns on delivery, not on how long you intended to hold.
How is delivery trading taxed in India?
+Delivery trades produce capital gains, because shares actually transfer into your demat account. For listed equity on which securities transaction tax is paid, gains on holdings of twelve months or less are short-term capital gains taxed at 20 percent under Section 111A. Gains on holdings beyond twelve months are long-term capital gains taxed at 12.5 percent under Section 112A, after a 1.25 lakh rupee annual exemption. These rates apply to transfers on or after 23 July 2024 under the Finance (No. 2) Act, 2024; any guide quoting 15 and 10 percent is citing the repealed schedule.
Can I set off intraday losses against delivery gains?
+No. The two sit in separate silos. Section 73 restricts speculative business losses, which is what intraday equity losses are, to set-off against speculative gains only, carried forward for at most four assessment years. Capital losses from delivery trades live under Section 74: short-term capital losses offset short or long-term capital gains, long-term losses offset only long-term gains, carried forward eight years. Neither silo can absorb the other, and carry-forward in both requires filing the return by the due date.
What happens if I forget to square off an intraday position?
+The broker risk system squares it off for you, typically in a window from around 3:20 PM, as a market order at whatever price the close offers, and usually with a separate square-off charge. You choose neither the time nor the price. If the stock is frozen at a circuit limit and cannot be squared off, the position converts into a settlement obligation: a long must be paid for in full and taken to demat, and a short that cannot be bought back goes to the exchange auction mechanism, which can be expensive. The square-off is not optional; it is the broker honouring a promise made to the clearing corporation.
Which needs more capital, intraday or delivery?
+Per rupee of exposure, delivery: you fund the full value of the shares, while intraday requires only the upfront margin, a minimum of 20 percent of trade value or the stock VaR plus ELM, whichever is higher. But margin is not a capital plan. Sizing from risk, the distance to your stop times your position, often demands similar capital for a sensible book in either mode. Intraday lower margin is capacity, not a licence to use it, and the leverage it makes available magnifies the loss as fully as the gain.
Why is the cost lower on intraday than on delivery per trade?
+The statute prices the two differently. Delivery equity attracts securities transaction tax at 0.1 percent on both the buy and the sell, so a full round trip pays 0.2 percent of value, and a depository charge falls on the sell. Intraday equity attracts securities transaction tax at 0.025 percent on the sell leg only, and lower stamp duty on the buy. Per trip intraday is far cheaper. The design assumes intraday trips repeat many times over, so the cheaper toll is paid again and again, while the delivery toll is paid once per position and then carried.
Can I convert an intraday position into a delivery position?
+Usually yes, before the broker cut-off. Trading platforms tag orders with a product code: an intraday code that must square off the same day, and a delivery code that settles to demat. Converting a long from the intraday code to the delivery code requires the full purchase value in your account, since you are now taking delivery. Note the tax consequence: the converted trade settles by delivery, so its result is a capital gain or loss, not speculative business income, and it leaves the speculative loss silo for good. The conversion has to happen before the broker cut-off, which precedes the auto square-off window.
Where the facts come from
Sources
- SEBI settlement schedule and the direct-to-demat reform. The T+1 rolling settlement activity schedule times the securities pay-out to the client demat account by 3:30 PM on T+1; the direct credit to the client account replaced the broker-pool route by a rule effective 14 October 2024, following the SEBI circular of 5 June 2024. The T+1 transition ran from 25 February 2022 and completed on 27 January 2023, adopted by the exchanges on an optional basis rather than by mandate. Verified against primary SEBI and clearing-corporation sources on 17 July 2026. sebi.gov.in
- Income-tax classification and rates. Section 43(5) defines the speculative transaction; Section 73 quarantines speculative losses with a four-year carry-forward; Section 74 governs capital losses over eight years; Sections 111A and 112A set STCG at 20 percent and LTCG at 12.5 percent above the ₹1.25 lakh exemption on listed equity, for transfers on or after 23 July 2024. The Income-tax Act, 2025 replaced the 1961 Act from 1 April 2026, renumbering these provisions. pib.gov.in
- Demat ownership. The Depositories Act, 1996, Section 10(3), makes the beneficial owner entitled to the rights and benefits in respect of securities held through a depository, the statutory basis for dividends, voting and pledging accruing to the delivery holder. incometaxindia.gov.in
- Margin framework. SEBI peak-margin circular of 20 July 2020 phased upfront margin collection to full force by September 2021; cash-segment upfront margin is VaR plus ELM, floored at 20 percent of trade value. SEBI study of individual traders in equity derivatives, September 2024, on net-loss incidence in the leveraged segment. sebi.gov.in
- Statutory and exchange cost schedule. STT at 0.1 percent per delivery leg and 0.025 percent on the intraday sell leg; uniform stamp duty of 0.015 percent (delivery buy) and 0.003 percent (intraday buy) since 1 July 2020; NSE cash transaction charge of ₹307 per crore per side (0.00307 percent) effective 1 March 2026; SEBI turnover fee of ₹10 per crore; GST at 18 percent on the broker fee and levies but not on STT or stamp duty. Verified 17 July 2026. pib.gov.in
Educational note. This guide explains settlement, ownership, margin and tax mechanics as they apply to Indian cash-market trades, and states every figure as of 17 July 2026. It is not a recommendation to trade or invest, it is not tax advice for your specific situation, and it is not investment advice. Rupee figures are illustrative and rounded. Bharath Shiksha is an educational publisher, not a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst.