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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.