Memo to Investors: Beware of the 'Comfort Zone'

Overconfidence is a trap worth avoiding

I have this saying that we're all making it up as we go along, with some people simply better at bluffing than others...

Some call that the imposter syndrome, but it's really little more than what occurs if you push yourself so far that you rise to the level of your incompetence… hopefully knowing when you've hit it.

That's how we build experience... but also how we gain confidence or our interpretation of whatever confidence is.

The trick is not to become overly confident.

That's an important nuance when it comes everything we do, but especially investing and business.

Avoiding that trap is a focus of my friend Peter Atwater's recently published book, The Confidence Map: Charting a Path From Chaos to Clarity...

Peter is probably best known to readers readers as a contrarian's contrarian. But his day job is as a professor at William & Mary College and the University of Delaware, where teaches classes on confidence and decision-making. He also consults businesses and hedge funds on the topi…