Policies and framework that changed with regard to day trading in India during 2021.

  1. Intraday leverage for equity stocks now becomes standardized to a maximum of 5 times of your trading funds. Maximum of 5 x intraday leverage across all stock brokers. Previously some brokers were providing close to or in excess of 20 times intraday leverage for the most liquid stocks.
  2. After the intraday leverage for equity stocks became standardized, some stock brokers stopped providing Cover Orders and Bracket order facility for Intraday trading.
  3. New Peak Margin Penalty Framework. Before the roll out of this new Peak Margin Penalty framework, if you were making use of excessive leverage than which is otherwise permitted by the exchange for the available trading funds in your trading account, the exchange would come to know of this only at the end of the day when the broker submits their end of day reconciliation reports. So, some brokers could have allowed some clients to make use of over the limit margin utilization, but tally it out before the end of day reports gets prepared.  With the new Peak Margin Penalty Framework , the status of your available trading funds and margin utilized gets submitted to the exchange by the broker several times during the trading day. This is a safety procedure to make sure that all clients are trading only within their individually allowed margin limits. So in case a client utilizes more than the allowable margin limits during the day (not just at the end of the day, which was the previous norm), the clients gets penalized with the Peak margin penalty charges for not following the rules. 
  4. The margin now required to do intraday trading in Futures contract is same as the margin previously required to take an overnight position on the same. ( 3 years back, with some stock brokers you could take an intraday position in Nifty Futures contract with less than 10k INR / 130 USD in your trading account. To take the same intraday position now, you will require a amount in excess of 100k  INR / 1300 USD in your trading account.)
  5. When selling your Demat holdings, only 80% of the amount receivable becomes available to you for taking new positions during the same day. For eg, if you sell stocks worth 1000 INR from your Demat account, only 800 INR becomes available to you on the same day for re-investment, the balance 200 gets released only on the next day.
  6. For buying and selling Options instruments, you will have to now use a Limit order type. Market order types are not now allowed for options instruments.
  7. From July 2021, the Nifty index futures lot size has been reduced to 50 units. Previously it was 75 units in a lot.
  8. With new changes to how the Stocks Settlement Process gets carried out, the client will now get charged Depository Participant Charges ( DP charges ) even for BTST trades carried out in the Equity segment.