The love of money, or avarice, or greed, is a sin. That's an ancient church teaching,

but gods and men have always mixed awkwardly, particularly here in Wall Street, and it turns out that greed can be bad for your wealth

Now, State Street's Center for Applied Research, Suzanne Duncan conducted research in more than 20 countries, and that showed you'll be a more successful investor if you don't love money for its own sake

The more that people love money, the more money they actually lose

And we define love of money by asking a series of questions to test their emotional attachment to money, and that's really what it's all about

What matters is the modern understanding of behavioral biases. We are all of us hardwired to want to buy at the top and sell at the bottom for example

and it turns out that those biases are exacerbated if you love money for its own sake

We found through the data that these high lovers of money, they actually make worse financial decisions, and they have worse financial outcomes as a result

If you love money, you're more susceptible to three major behavioral bias categories that we found

First is you're much more susceptible to instant gratification. In case you want a cocktail party term, this is hyperbolic discounting

Much more susceptible to this instant gratification, so you want the money, you want the money now,

and you're much less willing to set enough money aside to say comfortably retire

The second category that we found is looking at this hyperactive sort of behavior around trading, frequency

They trade too often, they watch the markets, which leads to the third behavior that we saw, which is very susceptible to greed and fear-based motives

The tendency to buy high, sell low, depending upon what the markets are doing

Now, in general, there's a close link between avarice and economic development

In poor countries that are growing fast, people tend to care a lot about money. For example, in China or India

In prosperous countries that have been stable for a long time, such as the Netherlands or Switzerland, people don't care so much about money. The big outlier to all of this - the US

The US is in fact the one biggest outlier, and it is much higher in the scale of love of money than what we would have originally anticipated

We found very tight correlations with those countries that have a low level of human development and/or prosperity. They also have a high love of money

The US is clearly the outlier here because we don't have those problems with respect to the infrastructure that's been built out,

so we should've come to the point where we could realize self-actualization, but we haven't yet in this country

It's irrational love of money that creates opportunities for the rest of us

Wall Street has turned into a great financial center by exploiting the greed and avarice of others

So what should we do about this? Focus on the goal, the ends, not the means, and perhaps listen to some religious advice