Indian regulators put a number on retail trading pain: 89 percent of retail investors in equity futures and options lost money in the 2021-22 financial year, an average of about ₹1.1 lakh each. The authors of a new paper cite that statistic and then ask an unusual follow-up question. If the losses come less from ignorance than from stress, distraction, and impulsive decisions, could a month of yoga move the numbers?
A team at Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana in Bangalore recruited 60 stock market investors and tried to find out. The results, published in the Indian Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, are modest in scale and encouraging in direction, and the authors are careful about which of those two things they lean on.
Here is how the study worked. The researchers circulated a Google form to investors they could reach, who passed it along to their own networks, a recruiting method called snowball sampling. Everyone who joined was actively trading, either intra-day or swing trading, and although the stated minimum was three months of experience, screening confirmed all participants had traded for more than a year. Their deployed capital ranged from under ₹2 lakh to over ₹1 crore. Ages ran from the early twenties to past sixty.
The crucial design detail: participants picked their own group. Thirty agreed to the yoga sessions and thirty declined and became the control group, who continued their normal routines and were offered the same yoga program after the study ended. That makes this a quasi-experiment rather than a randomized trial. The authors say random assignment was not feasible, because they had no roster of investors to draw from, and not everyone wanted to do yoga.
The intervention group attended a 60-minute online session every day for 30 consecutive days, following a standard module from the institute called Integrated Approach for Yoga Therapy. It combined joint-loosening warmups, three postures chosen for balance and calm (tree pose, eagle pose, and rabbit pose), two breathing practices, and a guided relaxation technique built around sustained humming and mental sound.
The team measured three things before and after. Perceived stress came from the Perceived Stress Scale, a widely used self-report questionnaire. Attention came from the 20-item Attention Control Scale, which asks about focusing and shifting attention. Financial performance came from return on investment, self-reported by each participant on a form the institute's experts reviewed.
All three moved in the yoga group. Average stress scores fell from 24.3 to 20.2, a drop of about 17 percent. Attention scores rose from 49.0 to 53.3, roughly 9 percent. Mean return on investment went from minus 0.80 to plus 1.00, which is to say the group as a whole crossed from slightly negative to slightly positive. The control group barely budged: stress stayed at 24.3, attention drifted down by about one percent, and returns edged further into negative territory.
The groups were statistically indistinguishable at the start on every measure, which matters. Afterward, the gap between groups reached statistical significance for stress and for return on investment, and for attention the between-group difference was just at the conventional threshold.
What the study cannot tell you
Self-selection is the central limitation, and it cuts deep. People who volunteer for a month of daily yoga may already differ from people who decline, in discipline, in optimism, in how much slack their lives have. Any of those traits could independently affect trading. Both stress and attention were self-reported by people who knew whether they had been doing yoga, so expectation alone could nudge the scores. Returns were self-reported too, not pulled from brokerage records.
The window was also short. One month of market movement is noise as much as signal, and a group average that shifts from a small loss to a small gain could reflect a favorable stretch of trading conditions as easily as sharper decisions. The authors themselves note that they did not measure the things that would explain a mechanism: impulse control, emotional regulation, heart rate, blood pressure. They also point out that their sample lumped novice equity traders in with experienced derivatives investors, and that the yoga module was generic rather than designed for this group.
Why it matters
Most advice aimed at struggling retail traders is about information: read more, learn technical analysis, understand the instrument. This paper starts from a different premise, one the authors draw from the existing literature, which is that the failures are largely psychological. Stress narrows attention. Narrowed attention produces worse decisions. Worse decisions produce losses, which produce more stress. If that loop is real, then interventions aimed at the trader rather than the trade deserve testing.
What this study offers is a first look at whether such testing is even worth doing, and the answer appears to be yes. Nobody dropped out, which the researchers attribute to the online format, and the same format let them reach people across different cities. A cheap, scalable intervention with zero attrition is a reasonable thing to put in front of a randomized trial with verified brokerage data and a longer follow-up.
Until that trial exists, the honest reading is narrow: in one small non-randomized study, investors who chose to practice yoga daily for a month reported feeling less stressed and more focused, and reported better returns than investors who chose not to. Whether the yoga caused the returns remains an open question, and the authors say so.