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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.

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.