Overplay his hand?

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).

Alright, here are two media examples of “overplay one’s hand”:

1. Yahoo was told to stop acting like a “jilted girlfriend” and get over the Microsoft affair which resulted in a failed $47.5bn bid to buy the internet portal.

Shareholder Matthew Rafat made his comments at Yahoo’s annual meeting of stockholders - which did not turn out to be as combative an affair as expected, with the board winning re-election.

There has been a lot of shareholder anger over how the Microsoft offer was handled but that was not in evidence at the gathering which was attended by around 150 people.

Chairman Ray Bostock disagreed with “the romantic analogy” and told shareholders there was “a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding” surrounding the Microsoft negotiations.

But Mr Rafat, whose family owns around 200 shares, told the BBC raking over the details of the deal was a bad move.

“This makes Bostock look like a jilted ex-girlfriend trying to save her dignity in the face of a larger more formidable suitor. And that’s not a good sign for the company."...

Stockholder Eric Jackson of Ironfire Capital, who controls a consortium of 3.3m shares, had another view and left the board in no doubt about his feelings.

“I think you overpaid on compensation. I think you overplayed your hand with Microsoft and I think you overstayed your welcome after last year’s vote and should do the honourable thing and step down from the board.”

- Yahoo board emerges unscathed, August 1, 2008.

2. Douglas Elliott, a non-partisan expert in financial services at the Brookings Institution, said JP Morgan and a few other firms were likely to be particularly alarmed at the prospect of a tightening of the existing cap preventing a bank from holding more than 10% of America's insured deposits: “They may already be over any limit under consideration. If they are, they'll probably be allowed to stay unchanged but it will mean they have to eschew acquisitions.”

He added that banks will not succeed in defeating restrictions entirely: “Everybody hates banks now and my intuition is that bank lobbyists overplayed their hand last year. It would have been better for them to work out some compromises rather than trying to destroy reform bills entirely.”

- Wall Street’s $26m lobbyists gear up to fight Obama banks reform, The Observer, January 24, 2010.