On 25 July, a fellow member of the Association of Registered Investment Advisors (ARIA) and I reached the final of the first quiz for securities market intermediaries, organised by the National Institute of Securities Markets (NISM), Sebi’s education body. We won.
For a moment, I wondered if this was another first. I was India’s first CeFT (Certified Financial Transitionist) and had been part of the first-ever CFP (Certified Financial Planner) convocation in India.
The thought passed quickly. We had won, and that was enough.
What stayed with me was what happened next. A number of NISM students who had participated in the quiz came up to ask how we knew so much across a range of topics. Their question stayed with me because the answer has little to do with finance. It is about habits.
Read beyond headlines
The first is reading the newspaper every day. It meant physical paper, starting with general newspapers and, over time, moving to business papers. Today, younger readers may prefer digital platforms. The medium doesn't matter. The habit does.
Reading isn't just absorbing headlines but understanding what they mean: the interpretation behind the news, not just the news itself. Anyone can read a headline. Understanding why something happened, and what it signals, takes practice, and that practice has to be repeated daily, in print or online, to mean anything.
The second habit is deliberately exposing yourself to subjects outside your own expertise, and to views that oppose your own. This can be done by browsing multiple websites, but not by scanning headlines across them. It means going in depth on what you read, understanding the implications, and joining the dots between different viewpoints to form your own view, one where you have clearly laid out the assumptions it rests on. It is easy, especially once you are experienced in one field, to stop reading outside it.
Challenge yourself
A narrow field of reading gives you a narrow field of vision. Listening to opinions that contradict yours is uncomfortable, but it is exactly what builds a rounded, 360-degree view of any situation, rather than a view shaped only by what you already believe.
The third habit is guarding against your own ego. The moment you start believing you are qualified enough, experienced enough, that you already know it all, that belief becomes your biggest weakness. Learning has to stay a permanent part of how you operate, not something you did once and finished.
There is a practical reason for this, too: continuously questioning your own way of looking at things and staying willing to experiment with new tools and technologies is also what will keep you relevant in a world where artificial intelligence is doing more of the routine thinking for us. The people who keep learning are the ones who don't get replaced by it.
These three habits, more than any technical knowledge, are what carried us through that quiz.
Curiosity compounds
The questions themselves proved the point. They ranged widely: finance-related, yes, but woven into stories about current events, the football World Cup, and client behaviour and psychology.
Some questions drew on international contexts, the kind of thing you only really absorb by travelling, watching other cultures, and noticing how differently people interpret the same situation. None of that comes from a textbook on securities markets. It comes from staying curious about everything else.
So when the students asked us how we knew so much, the honest answer wasn't about years in the industry or professional certifications. It was that none of those things sit in isolation. A newspaper read closely over decades, a willingness to hear the other side of an argument, and enough humility to keep learning: these built the base that the quiz happened to test.
I don't think it matters if this quiz counts as another first. What does matter is that the habits behind it are available to anyone—and can start today, with a newspaper.
Lovaii Navlakhi, managing director and CEO, International Money Matters Pvt Ltd. Views are personal