The market isn't math. It's human chemistry—fear, greed, dopamine, and cortisol dressed up as strategy. Confused? As Julie Andrews crooned in The Sound of Music, “Let us start at the very beginning…”
So, dear gentle reader, while at the onset, it may seem to you that you make your financial decisions based on market momentum, low valuation and that desire to buy the dip, deep inside, if one goes by work done by economist and academic, Gigi Foster, it is purely an amalgamation of brain cells and neurons moving into a biological network driven by ancient evolutionary impulses of fear and greed. Welcome to the world of cortisol and dopamine.
Okay, let us rewind further. It started as whispers in panicked Reddit threads and viral, unsubstantiated rumours around hedge funds. Hold your breath – by taking Ozempic, you might just be chemically castrating your hunger for a 100x return.
The next note – why and how. Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonists appear to have exploded into the global finance ecosystem.
Can Ozempic affect your trading?
Can a diabetes drug truly flatten your trading decisions? If one goes by online chatter, it may. In order to understand what is really happening, NDTV Profit decided to dig a little deeper.
At the onset, one has to understand an uncomfortable truth: Our brain is not wired for finance. It doesn't know what a derivative is. And evolution, while it did teach us how to create fire, it did not grant us neutral pathways for achieving F.I.R.E.
Instead, our brain rewires these biological processes originally evolved for foraging and hunting, for modern finance. The heart of the mechanism is called Dopamine Reward Prediction Error (RPE), which, centred around the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA) and projecting to the Nucleus Accumbens (NAc), functions as a learning signal that can drive behaviour modification and reinforcement learning.
How does it work? Let's say you are a discretionary trader. When you spot your perfect breakout pattern or an undervalued asset, VTA fires an anticipatory spike of dopamine. This is essentially the thrill of the chase - the urge to push your finger to the mouse to execute the trade.
This is where GLP-1 comes into the fray. Research done and published in the National Library of Medicine - a US government website - shows the drug is not only in the receptors that are sitting in your gut, but they are heavily concentrated in these exact centres of the brain. Research shows that semaglutide doesn't necessarily kill the joy of consuming the reward (or booking the profit), but it does aggressively dampen the dopamine signalling during the phase of anticipation.
What does Ozempic affect?
Finance, for one, has long been a hobby of the highly reactive, dopamine-starved individual - the Wolf of Wall Street archetype.
High performers often engage in addiction transfer, juggling between workaholism, market risk and after-hours research. The GLP-1, according to research done by Frontiers, interrupt this phenomenon at the root.
The obsession to scour through every piece of the balance sheet, listen to or read every earnings concall, perhaps as late as 2 AM, vanishes. You become calm, even as anxiety spikes up. In a normal profession, this sounds like a good thing. But for a trader, this is an anomaly and a liability.
A trader on Ozempic may drift towards being a satisficer rather than a maximiser -the desire to seek the absolute optimal outcome. The dopamine hit from a volatile, high-beta strategy is chemically muted. Think of it like a bad Marty Supreme movie.
You may find yourself in a position where you are simply content ‘hugging the index', closing positions immaturely simply because you lack the aggression.
There is also the factor of physical toll. The Indian ‘thin-fat' phenotype means Ozempic will be used heavily for cosmetic weight loss, often without any complementary training, thus resulting in rapid muscle loss, local doctors warn.
Given that Indian markets are often a gruelling sprint from 9:15 AM to 3:30 PM, demanding peak physical stamina can prove challenging. A trader experiencing lethargy and physical frailty, associated with a rapid, unmanaged weight loss.
The bottom line
So, will Ozempic turn you into a bad trader? Not really. Most of the research around Ozempic's behavioural side effects is not substantiated with high data points and can be largely anecdotal.
Moreover, Ozempic may only act as a behavioural filter, and its impact will be entirely subjective, depending on the user's pre-existing neurology, characteristic and trading style.
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