Intraday trading

Intraday trading means buying and selling something — a stock, a futures contract, a currency pair — within the same trading day, so that the position is opened and closed before the market shuts for the day. It is essentially another name for day trading; the "intraday" label just emphasizes that everything happens inside a single day's session rather than being held overnight.

The mechanics are simple: a trader enters a position sometime after the market opens and exits it before the close, sometimes minutes later, sometimes hours later. Because no position is carried overnight, the trader avoids the risk of the price gapping up or down when the market reopens the next day due to news, earnings, or events that happen while the market is closed.

The nuance that trips people up is that "intraday" describes the holding period, not a strategy or a market. You can day trade stocks, options, futures, or currencies, and you can do it using very different approaches — scalping tiny moves in seconds, or holding a position for most of the afternoon. What makes it "intraday" is only that the position does not survive to the next session. It also isn't the same as "intraday data," which just refers to price data recorded during the day (like 5-minute candles), even if no trade is involved.

Intraday trading also brings specific costs and rules that longer-term investors don't deal with as much: more frequent commissions or spreads paid, tighter attention needed to margin and buying power, and in some markets, pattern day trader style rules that affect how much capital is required to trade this way repeatedly.