 Overconfidence:

Confidence can be described as the “belief in oneself and one’s abilities with full conviction” while
“overconfidence can be taken one step further in which overconfidence talks this self – reliant
behaviour to an extreme” (Ricciardi and Simon, 2000). As a human being people have tendency to
overestimate their skills and predictions for success.

Extensive evidence shows that people are overconfident in their judgments. Psychologist has found
that people tend to be overconfident and hence overestimate the accuracy of their forecasts.

Overconfidence stems partly from illusion of knowledge. The human mind is perhaps designed to
extract as much information as possible from what is available.

They may not be aware that the available information is not adequate to develop an accurate
forecast in uncertain situations. Investment with overconfidence, can lead to inappropriate or risky
investments. Overconfidence causes investors to overestimate their knowledge, underestimate
risks, and exaggerate their ability to control events.

Not only people are habitually optimistic but they are overconfident as well. People are surprised
more often than they think. The classic study in overconfidence is Lichtenstein, Fischhoff and
Phillips(1982.) Individuals who exhibit overconfidence are said to be not well calibrated.
Overconfidence and optimism are potent combination. They lead investors to overestimate their
knowledge, understate the risk and exaggerate their ability to control the situation.

The two main facet of overconfidence are mis-calibration and better than average effect. Mis-
calibration can manifest itself in estimates of qualities that could potentially be discovered and in
estimates of not yet known quantities.

Overconfidence people are not well calibrated. In their prediction they set confidence bands overly
narrow, which mean they get surprised more frequently than anticipated (shefrin, 2000). This type
of overconfidence is known as mis-calibration. A more general definition of overconfidence is the
one by which people overestimate their own capabilities, usually with respect to capabilities of
other people on average. This is also known as better than average overconfidence. In financial
market overconfident investors are considered those who actively trade in such a way that the
difference between the stock they buy and those they sell does not cover transaction
costs(Odean,1998)

There is explicit and implicit assumption of the way overconfidence is modelled in theoretical
finance. Static model or models with constant overconfidence over time assume stable individual
differences in the degree of overconfidence that is miscalibration. Some papers such as Benos
(1998) even refer to investors’ different degree of overconfidence as different investor types.

People remember their success and forget their failures. Harvard psychologist Langer describes
these phenomena as “head I win, Tail its chance”. Which is termed as ‘selfattributionbias’. People
often treat their success due to their own skill and capabilities and they attribute failure to other
reasons like bad luck etc. Moreover overconfidence leads to higher trading in financial markets.

Overconfidence will result in:

• Mistaking luck for skill

• Too much risk

• Too much trading

So people tend to overestimate their belief and ability. Overconfidence suggests that investors
overestimate their ability to predict market events, and because of this they often take risk without
actually receiving proportionate returns. Psychological studies show that, although people differ in
their degrees of overconfidence, almost everyone displays it to some degree. For example most of
people rate themselves as above average drivers, but by definition 50% 0f driverare below average.

This kind of behaviour is predominate in all categories of professionals(Barber and Odean,1999).

Barclays Wealth management highlighted this as a tendency of individuals to place too much
confidence in their own investment decisions, beliefs and opinions. In financial market this leads to
form opinions about where the market is going on the basis of far too little information.

 Optimism
If humans were not inherently optimistic, we might not have evolved to this point. It
takes optimism to take risks, plan for a future and defer gratification. That bias toward optimism
often leads us to have an unrealistically positive view of ourselves and our futures. Studies show
that most people view themselves as above average in many categories and that their futures
are brighter than those of others. Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deals provide an example of
optimism expressed through the evaluation of opportunities—specifically the character of
synergies expected to increase the combined firm’s value as well as the time it will take to
realize that added value. Often, the optimism proves unwarranted as the “acquiring company’s
stock declines roughly two-thirds of the time.”
Optimism bias may also lead individual investors to overestimate their own investment
results. They subconsciously choose results from their portfolios that match their optimistic self-
perception as investors, and fail to measure the results of their entire portfolio. To counter this
bias, investors need to adopt an outsider’s view when evaluating investment ideas because the
insider’s view is usually overly optimistic. As Michael Mauboussin puts it in Think Twice:
Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition, insider optimism is susceptible to “anecdotal
evidence and fallacious perceptions.”
An outsider, however, “asks if there are similar situations that can provide a statistical
basis for making a decision. Rather than seeing a problem as unique, the outside view wants to
know if others have faced comparable problems and, if so, what happened. The outside view is
an unnatural way to think, precisely because it forces people to set aside all the cherished
information they have gathered.”