On September 24, 2026, the Securities Board of Nepal published a formal concept paper on intraday trading of securities and asked investors and other stakeholders for feedback. The proposal would let investors buy and sell the same shares within a single trading day, starting with a "Buy First, Sell Later" model on a limited set of liquid securities. The rumor version of this story will travel faster than the real one, so here is the honest version first: intraday trading is not live, no launch date has been announced, and nothing about your trading changes today. What exists is a proposal. A serious one, worth reading properly.
The document is the "Concept Paper on the Implementation of Intraday Trading of Securities in Nepal, 2083," published with an executive summary on SEBON's official website. It flows from the Ministry of Finance's "Capital Market Strengthening and Revival Action Plan, 2083," issued on 2083/05/29, which put both margin lending and intraday trading on this fiscal year's reform agenda. SEBON has listed specific topics on which it is inviting suggestions, which means this is a genuine consultation, not a done deal. The paper states three goals: deeper market liquidity, more effective price discovery, and modern capital market infrastructure, and it puts investor protection first among its guiding principles, ahead of risk-based regulation, phased implementation, and technology-driven real-time monitoring. That ordering is deliberate, and it shapes everything below.
Here is the concrete picture of how it would work at first. You buy 100 units of a stock at 10:30. At 2:15 it is up 3%, and you sell all 100. You go home holding no shares and carrying no overnight risk. That is "Buy First, Sell Later," and it is the only flavor SEBON wants to allow at the start. Two brakes are built in. First, only a limited set of securities would qualify at the beginning, with the scope expanding only after the pilot phase and a fresh risk assessment. Second, the rollout must fit Nepal's actual market structure and institutional readiness. This is a regulator saying, in effect: we will move slowly on purpose.
Short selling, meanwhile, has to wait, and the reason is plumbing. Selling shares you do not own, betting the price will fall so you can buy them back cheaper, only works if someone can lend you the shares, with collateral rules, margin systems, and a clearing house standing behind the whole chain. Nepal does not have that infrastructure yet. So SEBON's sequencing is "Sell First, Buy Later" only later, after securities lending and borrowing, and covered short selling, are properly built. It is the right order: a market that allowed naked shorting before the lending infrastructure existed would be asking for settlement failures.
Before intraday trading goes fully live, the to-do list is long: the legal and regulatory framework, criteria for which securities and which investors qualify, standard operating procedures for brokers, formal risk disclosure norms, margin and risk management systems, and surveillance capacity to watch it all in real time. The precondition list means SEBON, the Nepal Stock Exchange, CDS and Clearing Ltd., and the Stock Brokers' Association of Nepal all have to move together before anything goes live. When four institutions have to move together, the file is moving, but four institutions' paperwork is not a launch date. Read that list as a timeline, not a formality. This is why nobody should expect intraday trading next month.
The honest answer on who benefits has two sides. Active investors would get real flexibility: the ability to exit a position the same day instead of carrying overnight risk, and to act on news while it is fresh instead of watching from the sidelines. And there is a quiet win most people miss. Even if you never day-trade, more liquidity makes your trades cheaper and fairer: tighter spreads, faster fills, prices that actually reflect supply and demand. The other side is just as real. Every market with intraday trading teaches the same lesson: speed plus overconfidence is the fastest way beginners lose money. The costs are concrete too. Every round trip pays your broker twice, and small gains die in fees before they ever reach your pocket. Intraday trading rewards discipline and punishes impulse, and most retail accounts run on impulse. SEBON's design, buy-first-only, limited securities, eligibility criteria for investors, reads like a regulator that knows all of this. The right response is not excitement or fear. It is to read the paper, send feedback while the window is open, and keep trading exactly as before until there is an actual regulation with an actual date.
This article is research and education, not investment advice. It summarizes SEBON's official concept paper published on September 24, 2026; for the full text and the feedback topics, see the original notice on sebon.gov.np. Nothing described here is yet in force.