Reading is a best way to enrich yourself and achieve greater success as an individual and as a professional. For the profession of financial advisory, this is especially more true. The profession is one which is evolving in every aspect, be it markets, financial products, technology, practice management or client expectations. A good advisor is expected to be at the top of his game at all times. And being so is difficult if we are ourselves stagnant in our skills and knowledge.

There are countless books available on investing and financial advisory profession. While there may be many which are worthy of reading, we have tried to present here six books, the first set, which are more popular and often quoted. This compilation of books, sourced from the internet, is like a must read for advisors aspiring to get better.

	Questions Great Financial Advisors Ask…and Investors Need to Know - by Alan Parisse and David Richman In order to help clients (and prospective clients) truly meet their financial goals, the authors believe that a financial advisor must ask the right questions. By asking sincere and quality questions, advisors can deepen their relationship with their clients, learn their hidden thoughts about money, and work to create a plan that will help them achieve their goals. Apart from strategic questions that you should be asking your clients, Alan Parisse and David Richman fill Questions Great Financial Advisors Ask…and Investors Need to Know with anecdotes and stories from some of the world's top financial advisors.
	The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing - Revised Edition by Benjamin Graham, Jason Zweig & Warren E. Buffett Described as "by far the best book on investing ever written" by none other than Warren Buffett. "Chapters 8 and 20 have been the bedrock of my investing activities for more than 60 years," he says. "I suggest that all investors read those chapters and reread them every time the market has been especially strong or weak." Originally published in 1949, this book has sold more than a million copies and still tops best-selling business book lists. The gimmick-free revised edition, edited by senior Money magazine editor Jason Zweig, lays out the wisdom of value investing. Advising investors to take a big dose of reality for financial advisors when confronting market ups and downs, the book's key topics.
	The Trusted Advisor - by David H. Maister In today's fast-paced networked economy, professionals must work harder than ever to maintain and improve their business skills and knowledge. But technical mastery of one's discipline is not enough, assert world-renowned professional advisors David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford. The key to professional success, they argue, is the ability to earn the trust and confidence of clients. To demonstrate the paramount importance of trust, the authors use anecdotes, experiences, and examples -- successes and mistakes, their own and others' -- to great effect. The result is an immensely readable book that will be welcomed by the inexperienced advisor and the most seasoned expert alike.
	Storyselling for Financial Advisors: How Top Producers Sell - by Scott West and Mitch Anthony You know that trust is essential to creating long-lasting relationships with your clients. But how do you build that trust? And are you certain that you're doing it correctly? In Storyselling, the authors explain that the best communication–so vital to building and maintaining client trust—comes from using storytelling to selling financial products that best meet clients' needs. The book presents several practical selling strategies that financial advisors can use, while it also expands upon ideas that can help advisors make personal connections with a wide variety of clients, including niche groups such as women, the 50+ market, and high net-worth individuals.
	The Million-Dollar Financial Services Practice - by David J. Mullen Jr. Mullen reveals how to become a "top-producing" financial advisor using the method he has taught at Merrill Lynch, which involves templates, scripts, letters, action plans for relationship building and time management. Reading the book one may say that Mullen is either a brilliant teacher or a simplistic salesman. But either way, he details exactly what an advisor needs to accomplish to get the job done. There are no shortcuts here - the point is planning.
	The E-Myth Financial Advisor - by Michael E. Gerber and Michael Steranka Michael E. Gerber's popular E-Myth series is a definite must for anyone who has ever started a business. In The E-Myth for Financial Advisors, the authors analyze the many business mistakes that can ruin a financial practice, while they also present a hands-on, step by step plan to creating a successful advisory business. Great guidance for developing a business structure that provides consistently superlative client service. Read this book so you can increase your chances of success and live to start many more businesses.

Amrita, during her graduation days had read a book, which centered on the life and struggles of a girl from Istanbul, who is also a single mother. The book very beautifully portrayed not just the life of this girl but also personified the history and culture of Istanbul, the chronic tiff between Turks and Armenians, and the Armenian genocide. Amrita was so fascinated with this piece of fiction, that since then, she has always wanted to visit Istanbul, to feel those dingy lanes of the city, the mesmerizing view of the rising sun behind those picturesque mosques, travel in the local ferry and ingest the cool breeze of the sea.

Now years later, Amrita and her husband are planning for their first foreign trip. When Amrita browses among the blogs and videos for places, somehow Istanbul falls in place, it fits into all the parameters they have set.

This is an example of Confirmation Bias. You tend to find and support the information that you already believe in, while ignoring the rest, to strengthen your conviction.

We all are possessed with biases and we are looking for published material/people/videos/ to confirm our biases. And this analogy extends to investing too. You must have come across many investors trapped under the Confirmation Bias spell. Once an investor has developed a conviction in a particular stock or investment idea, he tends to research for material on that stock/idea and pick information that is in alignment with his belief, and generally gives himself a go ahead.

While it is okay to pick a restaurant or travel a country based on our pre-conceived notions, but in investing, the bias will affect the investor financially. An investing decision based on the investor's beliefs can make him lose money.

So, how do you extricate him out of the mental trap:

> Convey to the investor that he is being biased. Although when the investor is firm in his mind, there are chances that the information you hand out to him may not easily penetrate the bias wall. But it is essential for them to look at the other side of the coin too, so you have to show them the mirror, that bias exists. Narrate anecdotes, your own stories, like the one above, that how we tend to be biased for our case and look at only that material which is in line with our viewpoints. Share stories of investors who kept imbibing the confirmatory information, and took investment decisions that didn't go well in the end.

> Ask them to look for information which contradicts their belief. Say for instance, your client has heard from somewhere that the gala time for IT sector is over, and from now the stock prices of IT companies are likely to move in the reverse direction. Your investor has researched for more information on the internet and newspapers, all news and blogs he read are confirming to his opinion. So, now he wants to sell all the IT stocks in his portfolio and an IT sector Mutual Fund which he purchased years back. This investor is clearly under the confirmation bias trap. Urge him to specifically research for news or articles on the bright future prospects of IT sector. This activity will help them realize that there is another perspective that exists, and he should gauge the appropriateness of the alternate prospect too. Alternate opinions will let him look at the broader picture and take an informed investing decision.

Confirmation Bias influences our everyday decisions. A prejudice for a Pasta Arrabiata will lead us to zero down to it after scrutinizing a 10 pager menu, boasting of a 100 delicacies. But this bias should not extend to investing. While researching before investing is a sensible thing to do, but this research should be done from a neutral mindset. The investing decision making activity must be free from all sorts of behavioral biases. Don't let your clients' preconceived ideas and opinions clout their judgment and affect their investing decisions.

Intelligence is a word that people love when added to their name. It is a common belief that a person with high IQ is likely to succeed in all endeavors of his/her life.

But, when it comes to investing, a high Intelligence Quotient (IQ) is no guarantee of investment success. One of the biggest misconception people have about investing is that only one with a considerably high IQ can pick out the successful stocks and earn big money through investing. However, in reality, intelligence might not be the most important foretelling factors of investment success.

Even Warren Buffett, one of the world’s most influential and successful investor, said "Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ."

What if I tell you, Mr. X bought stock of Y company @180 and exits the stock @360, booking a 100% profit. But just months later, as the market rocketed up and seeing his friends becoming rich, Mr. X re-enters the stock @680 and exits the stock @175 when it crashed. You might say - Ha! the guy must not be smart or perhaps not well informed.

But, you will be astonished to know that Mr. X was Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest mathematician and scientist of his time.

He was a conservative investor most of his life. Yet, in 1720 when the london stock market started booming he got caught up in the South Sea Company stock market mania and lost half of his life’s savings. A man who calculated logarithms to 50 places had failed to do the math.

Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientist, invested almost his entire prize money from the 1921 nobel award in the stock markets. However, he lost a bulk of it when the markets crashed in 1929.

Einstein and Newton, both were brilliant and numbers were their lifelines; all their scientific calculations were based on time risk and mathematics. Yet, none of this worked in their favour when it came to the investment in stock markets.

If high intelligence was the key to successful investing, top business school professors and economists would be the wealthiest guys on the planet.

Financial trading offers a perfect example of how conventional measures of intelligence are irrelevant to success. The market does not care where you went to college. It does not care what your grades were in statistics class. It does not care about the valuable connections you made in business school.

Then, what's the recipe for investment success?

Warren Buffett, said: “To invest successfully does not require a stratospheric IQ. What’s needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding the framework.”

According to Michael Batnick, director of research at Ritholtz Wealth Management,

"Emotions are a far more important driver of success than IQ. What made Warren Buffett such a great investor was not just superior intellect, but emotional fortitude to stay true to his strategy during deep drawdowns,"

IQ may be useful when it comes to analyzing complicated investments. However, patience, discipline and perspective are all more closely-tied to Emotional Quotient (EQ) than IQ.

The most iconic investors of all time, including Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, George Soros and Benjamin Graham, have all demonstrated emotional intelligence in their investment decisions.

EQ is about the ability to control our emotions from running wild and interfering with our investment rationale. Examples are: not being influenced by peers or market rumours, not getting too excited when we spot a good investment and buy beyond our means or position limits, not chasing the stock as it goes above our target buy price for fear of missing out, not losing our nerves as the stock keeps on rising or falling, etc.

If we have the IQ to spot a good investment but do not have the EQ to hold on to it until its full potential is realised, our competency as investors will be diminished.

Sometimes it doesn't matter how much complex quantitative analysis you perform on a stock. At the end of the day, share price is determined by the market and not by a number that an algorithm spits out. Financial markets are made up of millions of people around the world. Understanding how other investors are feeling, identifying why they are buying and selling and anticipating what they will be doing next all involve emotional intelligence.

Warren Buffett has pointed out that you don't have to be brilliant to become a great investor. Buffett said:

"Success in investing doesn't correlate with IQ once you're above the level of 125. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing."

So in Buffett's eyes, the right temperament and not high intelligence is the key to profitable trading and investing.

Our emotions are extremely intertwined with our money and our financial decisions often have more to do with our EQ (emotional intelligence) than our IQ. To experience better outcomes, we need to make better decisions. To make better decisions, it’s crucial to better manage our emotions and raise our emotional intelligence.

Investing is no rocket science. To be a really good investor, along with intelligence, you should also have high EQ.