Muhurat Trading FOMO: Why You Buy on Diwali

Your family WhatsApp group had already gone quiet by 6 PM, everyone busy with pooja preparations. But your trading group hadn't. Someone dropped a screenshot, "muhurat trade karo bhai, shubh hai." You had zero conviction on the stock. You'd never even looked at its balance sheet. You placed the order anyway, ten minutes before the session opened, diya still burning on the table next to your phone, some quiet part of you already knowing you'd regret it before the candle finished burning down.

What Muhurat Trading FOMO Actually Is

Muhurat trading FOMO is the pressure to place a trade during Diwali's short symbolic session purely because it's considered auspicious, not because you've researched the stock. It happens because the ritual carries cultural weight most other trading decisions don't, so the usual filters, research, conviction, a plan, quietly switch off for that one hour.

It's worth being precise about what Muhurat trading actually is before getting into why it hooks people so easily. NSE and BSE hold a short, symbolic session on Diwali marking the start of the Hindu financial new year, Vikram Samvat. The exchanges set the time each year: in 2025 it ran from 1:45 pm to 2:45 pm, and in 2026 it is on Sunday, 8 November, from 2:20 pm to 3:30 pm. Lakshmi Puja is traditionally performed at the exchanges, many broker offices get decorated with rangoli and diyas, and the belief is that trading during this specific window brings prosperity for the year ahead. The trades are real and settle like any other day's, but the session is short, and the moves in either direction rarely mean much on their own.

None of that stops the buying. Every year, financial media and broker apps run lists of "top Muhurat stocks" and "what to buy this Diwali." Not because the fundamentals suddenly changed that day, but because the calendar said so, and everyone around you is doing it too.

Why the Ritual Overrides Your Usual Filters

You'd never buy a stock on a random Tuesday with no research behind it. So why does Diwali feel different? Partly because the entire hour is wrapped in language that bypasses analysis altogether, "shubh muhurat hai," "Diwali ke din kuch lena toh banta hai." That's not investment language, it's ritual language, and your brain processes it completely differently. You're not weighing a decision, you're participating in a tradition, and traditions don't usually get fact-checked in the moment.

There's also a herding effect that may get stronger because the window is so short. When the whole session is compressed into about an hour of visible, shared activity, everyone's trading group, everyone's broker app notification, everyone's family member with a demat account, the social proof can hit harder than it would on a normal trading day spread across a full session. You see people buying, you assume they know something, and you follow, even though most of them are following someone else doing exactly the same thing.

Brokerage apps aren't neutral bystanders in this either. Push notifications about "Muhurat trading is live" and curated lists of "top picks for Samvat" often start arriving days before the actual session, framed with the same festive urgency as a sale banner. That's not a conspiracy, it's just ordinary marketing timed to a moment when attention and impulse are both already elevated, but it does mean the platform itself is quietly nudging you toward action, not away from it, right when your own judgment is least reliable.

And there's a specific Indian layer underneath all of it. Diwali is when money gets ritually honoured, Chopda Pujan, the worship of the account books, the belief that how you treat wealth on this one day sets the tone for the coming year. That's a beautiful tradition on its own terms. It just wasn't built to double as sound trading advice, and treating it that way quietly convinces otherwise careful traders to override every rule they'd normally follow, the same instinct that shows up the rest of the year as why you keep moving your stop-loss whenever a decision feels emotionally loaded instead of purely tactical.

The Numbers Behind the Feeling

There is no official count of how much Diwali-linked impulse buying happens. The exchanges and SEBI do not publish a separate retail-participation figure for the Muhurat session, so any claim about how big it is should be treated as a guess. What is plain is that the session is driven by the date on the calendar rather than by market news, which is exactly why it is a good place to notice your own habits.

Zoom out from just this one evening and the pattern gets more sobering. A SEBI study released in August 2026 found that 87.7% of individual traders in the equity derivatives segment lost money in FY26, down from about 91% in FY25, with net losses of about ₹91,685 crore in FY26 and a revised ₹1.12 lakh crore in FY25. Muhurat trading itself is a much smaller, calmer corner of the market than F&O speculation. But the underlying instinct, buying because of a feeling rather than a plan, is exactly the same one that drives those bigger losses the rest of the year. One night of festive buying rarely wrecks anyone's account on its own. The habit of letting sentiment override your process, though, is worth catching wherever it shows up, including the short session everyone insists is harmless.

Worth asking honestly where your own Muhurat trade sits on that spectrum. A small, symbolic position in a stock you'd have bought anyway is genuinely harmless festive tradition. Escalating that position size every year because last year's smaller trade felt underwhelming, or chasing an F&O position specifically because the "shubh muhurat" framing makes it feel lower-risk than it actually is, edges toward the same territory covered in when trading crosses into gambling, just with a festival costume on.

What Actually Helps Here

Deciding your Muhurat trade in advance, on a normal day, with a clear head, works better than deciding it live in the moment. If a stock genuinely fits your existing thesis and you'd have bought it on any other Tuesday too, trading it on Diwali isn't really FOMO, it's just timing a decision you'd already made. The problem isn't Muhurat trading itself, it's letting the ritual make the decision for you.

It also helps to separate the cultural act from the financial one entirely, if that's realistic for your family. Doing the puja, lighting the diya, treating the day as meaningful, none of that requires an actual buy order. Plenty of traders participate symbolically, a token trade of a few hundred rupees in something they already understand, rather than a real position sized on impulse.

Talking honestly with other traders about this particular pressure helps more than people expect, mostly because almost nobody admits to feeling it. Everyone in the trading group projects confidence about their Muhurat pick, and it's rare that anyone says out loud "I genuinely don't know why I bought this, everyone else was buying." That silence is exactly what keeps the social comparison trap running every single year, each person assuming everyone else has more conviction than they actually do.

Setting a firm cap in advance, before the diyas are even lit, works better than trying to exercise willpower live during the session itself. Decide the maximum amount you're willing to put into a purely symbolic trade while you're still calm and clear-headed, days before Diwali, and treat that number as fixed regardless of how the group's energy shifts once the session actually opens. The cap matters less for its size than for the fact that it existed before the pressure did.

If Diwali buying does turn into a loss, watch for the specific version of revenge trading that shows up right after, trying to "win back" what felt like a small, symbolic amount can quietly spiral into something bigger, precisely because the original trade felt low-stakes and ritual rather than a real decision you're accountable for.

A Small Thing I've Noticed

I'm not primarily a trader myself, most of my time goes into CA prep and building Artha, but I've watched this exact pattern play out in the Traders' Talk room every festive season. The people who seem to handle Muhurat trading best aren't the ones who avoid it entirely out of discipline. They're the ones who decided what they were doing before the diyas were even lit, and stuck to that decision regardless of what the group chat was doing that hour.

One short session of trading, however symbolic, isn't actually capable of deciding your year. What did you end up buying last Diwali, and did you actually know why at the time, or only afterward?

Regulatory & Educational Disclaimer: The content on HeyArtha is published strictly for educational, career awareness, and personal reflection purposes. Nothing contained in this article constitutes financial, investment, legal, or taxation advice. We are not a SEBI-registered investment advisor or research analyst. Trading and investments in financial markets involve risk of capital loss. Always consult a certified professional before making financial commitments.