Slashdot Mirror
World Cup Forecasting Challenge For Quants
databuff writes "As a break from projecting the strength of subprime mortgages, credit default swaps, and other obscure financial instruments, quantitative analysts at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, UBS, and Danske Bank have modeled the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Now Kaggle has set up a forecasting competition, allowing statisticians to go head-to-head with these corporate giants. The challenge is to predict how far each country will progress in the tournament."
For somebody falling to the ground clutching their leg long enough to get a card thrown?
There are numerous problems here.
Firstly is very few fans of football can truly consider themselves independent enough to do this well. I will try, but I just know my bias's will in the end have some effect on the outcome of my selections.
Secondly it isn't just about stats at something like the world cup where there are very few second chances and It is a game where you can completely dominate the opposition and still lose to a single error or bad ref decision.
I wouldn't put too much stock in their predictions. You know its fishy when they forecast Angola as a "team with strong fundamentals and underlying security". (I'm not even sure Angola has a team).
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
I mean, the financial market is still a mess and I'd rather have them working on the real issues we face. Or is this a quick glance at what actually always goes on at those companies? Are they nothing more than professional gamblers and don't care about their responsabilities?
For the record, quants rarely try to predict things in the market. That's left to people who work in econometrics. The main job that a quant does is to price financial instruments in a way that is consistent with the market prices of other liquidly traded assets. I'm being deliberately vague about what precisely is meant by "consistent" because that often depends on the choice of model, but there are also model-free results which require certain asset prices to obey certain relations: put-call parity, for example.
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
<spam>If you think you're good at this sort of thing, you might want to join the free online prediction game I run. There's a US$50k prize up for grabs, if you're better than these guys...</spam>
(Yeah it's spammy, but check my account ID - it's not like I just signed up recently or anything)
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
For just $10,000 in unmarked and nonsequential bills, Vinnie "the kneecap" is willing to venture a prediction as to when any particular team is going to drop out.
"When yous got a problem, pick Vinnie. We don't predict; we Promise."
I've written an online Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulator where people can experiment with pairwise team predictions in order to not just predict tournament winners, but more interestingly, to evaluate the most profitable expected payoffs from current betting odds (which are almost never the most likely teams to win). The page goes into the statistical basis of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) quite a bit, and the simulation is all done client-side using javascript. Might be interesting for those who like this kind of stuff. http://www.donationcoder.com/wcp
Who knew JP Morgan had a sense of humor? I mean, England World Champions? Hilarious!
"You can't allow somebody to commit the crime before you detain them." [Condoleezza Rice]
15 years ago, when I was working as a Systems Analyst at a Brazilian bank that shall remain nameless, it was common knowledge that trading desks all over the country were engaging in this kind of thing. They would create "financial products" tied to World Cup statistics and use all the technology, corporate and individual knowledge at their disposal to try to predict the outcomes and win or lose huge sums of money. Individuals bet with their own money and the corporations they worked for (and who provided the infrastructure for this) tended to look the other way. One such "product" I remember well was the so-called "GDC" ("Gols Da Copa" - Cup Goals) which created a market around the total number of goals to be scored during the World Cup. I knew one trader who payed for his house with his GDC money. Most of the time it was a mostly harmless hobby (if you discount the fact that gambling is illegal in Brazil) but as the World Cup final approached, I was very aware that the resources who were supposed to be working on models of commodities, foreign exchange and other markets did little else than model the World Cup; this included both people and computational resources. I wonder if some of my old colleagues in Brazilian banking ended up finding positions in Wall St.
For American non-football fans, the "World" in "World Cup" means that lots of different countries from around the world participate. Different kind of "World" from "World Series Baseball" which I believe has a different interpretation of what the word means ;-)
Sorry, couldn't resist it ;-) Hey, you're in the football world cup too, and you're not too bad at the game either!
(yes I know it might just mean the name of a newspaper rather than a particularly limited view of how many countries there are out there...)