Behaviour investing books - particularly the comprehensive titles like Behavioural Investing by James Montier, will cover behavioural investing from multiple angles. 

At least a few chapters though, will be dedicated to behavioural biases. 

What is a behavioural bias?

A behavioural bias is like a 'shortcut' that human tend to make when making decisions. They're unconscious frameworks that our brains use to interpret, store and use information to make decisions. 

Although the word 'bias' has negative connotations, a bias is not always irrational. You can easily visualise scenarios in which biases could help an investor protect themselves from losses, increase theirs gains, or simply save them time analysing. 

However, because biases are unconscious, they can often skew our decision making, and lead to a majority of investors taking a particular action, whereas the best personal finance books would have predicted investors to have taken more evenly-distributed choices. 

In this way, biases become our foil, because they can create 'herd-like' behaviour, as the population of investors will tend towards a bias in response to new information. In this section of our behaviour investing book page, I'd like to highlight a few interesting biases which the books above will expand upon in detail. 

1. Loss aversion

Loss aversion is the idea that human prefer to avoid a loss than to enjoy a gain. Said another way, they find losses more painful to deal with, than they find profits delightful. 

This means that when an opportunity presents itself with a small possibility of a large loss, investors may fixate on the loss outcome, and this may steer them away from the investment. 

It's easy to see how practitioners cater towards loss averse investors when they design structured products. These investment products tend to include a 'capital protection' clause, which may allow investors to escape the worst case scenario, at the expense of lower expected returns overall. 

Due to loss aversion, some investors value this trade-off, despite the fact that (losses included) they are over-paying for the protection, and seeing lower risk-adjusted returns overall. 

Read more: The best structured products books

Another side-effect of loss aversion is investors sitting on loss-making investments and refusing to sell, on the basis that this would crystallise a loss. 

If an investor churns their successful investments, but hangs onto their poorly performing stock picks, this has the ultimate effect of loss-making or off-trend investments accumulating over time in an investor's portfolio.

2. Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias is the human habit of seeking out and paying more attention to information that confirms our existing point of view. 

As an investor, when testing a theory (such as, is now the right time to buy shares), you should be able to see the benefit of looking for opinions of people who believe the opposite. 

After all, if other sophisticated investors have reached the opposite conclusion to you, perhaps they have information that you do not. It makes sense to read widely to ensure that you are making a decision based on all the information. 

Confirmation bias works against this quest for conflicting information. We find that we do not 'like' hearing views that disagree with our own, particularly if we have become invested in our own idea. 

This provides a nudge away from articles which disprove our theories, and towards content which gives us a pat on the back, and the warm feeling of support and agreement. 

Because investing is such an uncertain game, confirmation bias hinders investors from making good decisions, because in search for the comfortable thought that they are totally correct, they become pigeonholed in potentially niche viewpoints which aren't shared by other market participants. 

These are just two of the 10+ behavioural biases which you can read more about in the behavioural investing books above.