Available to try. Cleared the quality bar over six-month, one-year, and two-year intraday backtests (profit factor 1.22 on the six-month window, 65 trades).
Every new day trader starts in the same place: a five-minute chart, a handful of liquid stocks, and a rule that fires several times a week. On the chart it looks busy and plausible. On a broker's statement it bleeds, because an ordinary five-minute bar on a NIFTY 50 stock spans about a quarter of a percent from high to low, while the round-trip slippage, brokerage, STT, and exchange charges eat roughly a fifth of a percent on every trade.
If your cost of doing business is almost as wide as the bar you are trading, you cannot win by trading often. You can only win by refusing to trade until the move is far larger than the fee.
What counts as an extreme
Between 09:30 and 13:30, the strategy watches hourly bars on six of the most liquid NSE large caps: RELIANCE, HDFCBANK, ICICIBANK, INFY, TCS, and SBIN. It asks for two things at the same time: the close must sit outside a 2.5-standard-deviation Bollinger Band (wider than the textbook 2.0 band), and the 14-bar RSI must be below 20 for a buy or above 80 for a short sale.
Most days, across all six stocks, that does not happen once. When it does, a stock has been sold off or chased hard enough in a single morning that the intraday move is already two to three percent — wide enough that even a partial afternoon snapback is several times larger than the round-trip cost.
The secret to day-trading large caps after charges is not a faster indicator. It is refusing to pay brokerage on an ordinary hour.
What the test found
Tested across the same six large caps with full slippage and commissions, the hourly 2.5-sigma exhaustion scalp achieved a 1.22 profit factor over six months (65 trades, 47.7% win rate), 1.20 over one year (126 trades), and stayed net positive over the full two-year window (257 trades). Because winners average roughly 1.5x the size of losers when the afternoon snapback arrives, a win rate just under half is enough to come out ahead after charges.
Every position is closed by 15:15 if neither the stop nor the target has been hit first. Nothing is carried overnight.
When it hurts
Fading an extreme means stepping in front of a fast move. When a company has just reported a genuine surprise or a sector is repricing for good reason, an oversold stock can get more oversold into the close. That is what the two to three percent stop is for: it caps the day's mistake and lets the strategy walk away.
If you take one thing away
Intraday scalping on NSE large caps only beats brokerage when the move it fades is much larger than the fee. Waiting for an hourly 2.5-sigma + RSI 20/80 extreme is what makes the arithmetic work.
Want to adjust intraday exhaustion scalp to your own stop or stock list? Open a working copy on the plain-English Rule Sheet.
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