|
Reader question: What does this headline – Has Buffet overplayed his hand? – mean? My comments: It questions whether Buffet, Warren Buffet, a Wall Street mogul, has overestimated his strength in doing something. In other words, has he been overoptimistic? Has he underestimated potential problems? In concrete terms, has he, say, overpaid for a struggling company’s shares? Risk taking being the name of the game in Wall Street and Buffet being amongst the best of them, you can’t question his knack for buying shares of struggling companies and watch them climb. But he headline from above does ask: Has he been overconfident? Anyways, “overplay one’s hand” is the question to address here. This term originates from the game of card playing – the “hand” represents one’s cards in HAND. If you have many strong cards, you may become overconfident and bring them out too soon or use them all in the initial stages of the game, without worrying whether your opponents may have something up their sleeves, metaphorically speaking of course. You think you can beat your opposition hands down, again metaphorically, but after you have used all your trump cards, one of your opponents somehow produces a piece that trumps yours... Result: bitter defeat for you. That’s a lesson for you not to overplay your hand in future. That is, do not misunderestimate – to borrow a misspelling from former US President George W. Bush – the strength of the opposition. Curb your confidence lest overconfidence leads you to taking unwarranted risks (and ultimately to your undoing). | 
