Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

World Cup Prediction Failures

Posted by timothy on from the goal-oops-I-mean-nope dept.

pdcull writes "We all read on Slashdot about the investment banks using their massive computer power and clever modeling techniques to predict the FIFA World Cup outcome. Now that Goldman Sachs's, UBS's and Danske Bank's favorite, Brazil, has been eliminated, and with JP Morgan's England long gone, the question that begs to be asked is: can we really trust these guys to predict the financial markets any better than they did World Cup?"

3 of 312 comments (clear)

  1. Look at the numbers first by Flavio · · Score: 5, Informative

    Goldman Sachs gave Brazil (the "favorite") only a 13% chance of winning the world cup.

    The fact that Brazil was eliminated is not at odds with the reports.

  2. Re:We have to! by malkir · · Score: 4, Informative

    The owner of BP is part of GS.

  3. Re:We have to! by HungryHobo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Some people have this idea that bankers and investors have an almost godlike knowledge of the world and the future.
    On forums which attract financial types I'll see people dismissing stocks on the basis that "of course if they were really more valuable the traders would have snapped then up".
    It's as if they don't realize that the traders are operating on almost no information in some cases. living across the street from a company and being able to count the trucks going in and out will often put you ahead of the traders in terms of real information.