confident to a fault

A research surveyed 7,000 CFOs over a six-year span, asking them to predict a range of 1-year and 10-year returns of the S&P 500 index and divulge how certain they felt about their predictions. Although most of the CFOs felt very sure of themselves when selecting, they were correct just 38% percent of the time.

Wanting to be right or thinking to be right or for that matter hoping to be right does not translate to 'being right'.

Despite the dangers of overconfidence, many people contend that it's better to have too much confidence than too little. Well simply because confidence displays a positive attitude, though the positive attitude has no play or driver on reality. Reality is distinct from ones attitude, it is like hoping the wind will blow the way one thinks, this is seldom if never the case.

John Maynard Keynes made a profound observation on confidence when he wrote, "Individual initiative will only be adequate when reasonable calculation is supplemented and supported by animal spirits."

What Keynes meant by animal spirits is that the individuals who do create economic prosperity have to embrace a "naive optimism" and must put aside the thought of ultimate loss, just as healthy men put aside the thought of death.
Well I reckon he is stating you need to be a calculative risk taker, but then all confident or over confident folks think of themselves as calculated risk takers.
The under-confident ones don't take risks even if they can calculate, so that leaves then out!

I guess we are back to square one we still can't distinguish between a confident and over confident dolt. Another point is with a 38% chance at being correct, our thinking of being right is lower than the probability of being right.
Probability alone should have rendered a 50% success rate, but in this case confidence alone lowers success rate by 12%, which is pretty significant.

I guess we are better off just taking chances then...