When envy, jealousy, and lust caus credit problems
October 13th, 2009
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.