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Sometimes other character defects are disguised as patience. Overly optimistic investors are often mistaken for patient. Investors who rationalize away all negatives or who refuse to accept losses appear to be patient.

Unjustified patience combined with blind loyalty is common among those who bought tech stocks in the bubble only to see them become penny stocks in the tech wreck. Many of these investors loved the product or the idea the company represented. They bought the stock, knowing nothing of stock investing. Patience and loyalty caused them to hang on, until the company’s bankruptcy, if necessary. Many band together in chat rooms and bolster each other’s loyalty during the long decline toward de-listing of the stock.

Saving and investing require some patience to produce profits. Speculating is often more appropriate for the impatient. However, both patience and impatience can be character flaws with saving, investing, and speculating. Investors who pride themselves on their great patience can ride losing stocks into bankruptcy. Appropriately patient stock investors sell when the fundamentals start to deteriorate. Impatient real estate investors run up commissions and expenses trading properties before they mature. Patient real estate investors improve the property, upgrade the tenants and wait for the peak of the next up cycle before they sale. Patient options traders often miss the best opportunities to make profits and watch their options expire worthless.

Often we invest in something because someone else has invested in it. Look close and see if this involved envy, jealousy, or lust. Gotta-have-it investors often buy a series of bad investments because other people own them. Every year it is something different. In 1999, they bought tech stocks; in 1998, they bought index funds; in 1997, they bought REIT funds.

Some character flaws are only remotely connected to money. Lust comes up as a character flaw when you invest to impress a potential or actual lover. In Silicon Valley, many venture capital investments were made to provide pickup lines in coffee shops.

Jealousy and envy combined with pride sometimes lead to avoiding investments. Many people were jealous of 25-year-old multimillionaires who made fortunes quickly in the tech bubble. Too proud to follow their lead, some jealous investors avoided all stocks and suffered with paltry returns from CDs. When the tech bubble crashed, their jealousy turned into I-toldyou-so gloating. A riddle that made the rounds of Silicon Valley was: How do you get a dotcom CEO off your porch? Pay him for the pizza.

Unfortunately, such gloating further solidified jealous investors avoidance of even lucrative value stocks. It also led to demeaning hardworking innocents such as people who deliver pizza.

No matter how small a part you played, write it down. No matter how minor a character flaw, write it down. For example, if you are baffled by your tech investments, you might write down, “I bought the investments. I believed they were good long-term investments. I am something of a conformist. I bought them because everybody from the office was buying them.

My character flaw is being an occasional conformist, as most of the time I am more of a rebel.” If you have resentment at the insurance salesperson who sold you the variable annuity, you might write down, “I needed a lot of money in a tax-deferred account right away. So I bought the product. Maybe I was a little greedy, trying to get a lot of savings too quickly. I was also jealous of Maggie who has all that money in her 401(k).” If you are resentful that your stock options became worthless, you might write down, “I was a victim of sales pressure. They offered me the low salary with substantial options showing me how well other employees had done with their options.

Okay, I did take the job. Maybe my character flaw was greed. But I also had those options for five years and could have exercised them early on and made a lot of money. It wasn’t just greed. Every time the stock took a dive, I rationalized it away, believing the original sales pitch I was given. I am a very loyal character. But in this situation my loyalty was a character flaw. I stayed loyal to the stock and the company despite all the evidence around me that things were falling apart.” A very small character flaw can have a big impact. Consider everything.

For example, an investor who grew up in Texas retired in Florida. While he kept most of his money in CDs all his life, in retirement he put $20,000 into a scheme that was run out of his birth town and whose employees, before they fled the country, had the same accent as he and knew the street he grew up on and the schools he attended as a child. For that reason, he trusted them when he would never have put money in a similar scheme run out of New York or California or Nevada.

Recently there have been a slew of articles and books proclaiming overconfidence as the major character flaw of investors. However, many investors will not have overconfidence on their list. In fact, the opposite may be the case. A complete lack of confidence may have led you to rely on supposed experts who took you for loads and commissions and put you into terrible investments.

A few years ago, fear and greed were the most talked about character flaws. Yet, you may not suffer from either of these. Do not try to force your part into trendy character flaws. This is your inventory, not a survey. Describe your part in whatever language fits best.

Your part is the most important aspect of the inventory. The prior steps are designed to break down enough denial so you can look at your own character flaws. When you realize that your happiness and possibly your life are on the line, you will write down, with rigorous honesty, what you did to bring about the resentment, fear, uncomfortable feelings and ideas, impacts on the relationship, and what aspect of character led you to do those things.

If you have difficulty figuring out what your character flaws are, look at the list. Ask if in some way any of these character flaws played even a small part in any investment on your list.

No two investors have the identical list of character flaws. Moreover, identical investments can trigger different shortcomings in each investor. If four employees receive a bonus of 100 identical stock options, each employee may have entirely different reactions. One may fear the options will become worthless; another may be overly confident that the options will soar in value and purchase a new car expecting to pay down the loan with option profits; a grandiose employee may offer to buy the options of the others at a premium to their current estimated value; an employee expecting a cash bonus may be disappointed and encounter trouble at home as the spouse expected a cash bonus for a long awaited vacation. No matter what character trait you experience, write it down.