Intraday Trading
Intraday trading means buying and selling securities or currencies within a single trading day, with all positions normally closed before the session ends.
Approx. 1 min read · Updated October 9, 2026
What is intraday trading?
Intraday trading refers to buying and selling securities, currencies or other instruments within a single trading day. Market participants try to take advantage of the day's price fluctuations and usually close all their positions by the end of the session.
"Intraday" describes the holding period of a trade rather than a particular strategy. Day traders trade exclusively intraday, and scalpers do so with holding times of only minutes, but a swing trader who normally holds positions for several days may also open and close a trade within one day. The word is also used for price data within a day, such as intraday charts or the intraday high and low.
What counts as a trading day?
On an exchange, the trading day is defined by the opening and closing times of the session. The forex market, by contrast, trades around the clock on weekdays; there, the trading day is commonly considered to end with the daily rollover at 5 p.m. New York time. Positions that are still open at that moment are carried over to the next day, and a swap (an overnight financing charge or credit) is applied.
Example: a trader buys EUR/USD during the European morning session and sells it again in the early afternoon. This is an intraday trade: no swap is applied, and the position is not exposed to any price gap overnight.
Why it matters for traders
Closing positions intraday limits exposure to overnight news and gaps and keeps financing costs out of the calculation. On the other hand, price moves within a single day are smaller than moves over several days or weeks, so spread and commission make up a larger share of the potential profit, and leverage has to be handled with particular care.
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More terms.
- Day TradingDay trading is a short-term, speculative trading style in which positions in shares, currencies or futures are opened and closed within the same trading day.
- ScalpingScalping is a very short-term trading method in which positions are held for only seconds or a few minutes in order to profit from small price movements.
- Closing a PositionClosing a position means ending an open trade with an offsetting transaction: a long position is closed by selling, a short position by buying back the same quantity.
- FlatA trader is flat when they have no open positions. A market or share is also called flat when its price moves sideways for a longer period without significant moves.