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World Cup Prediction Failures
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?"
We just bailed out the banks, so it's too late to start throwing in votes of no confidence!
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
The answer to a question.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Surely the last couple of years are evidence enough that the financial industry can't predict or manage the markets? We didn't need football to tell us this :D
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
What's an investiment bank?! I don't trust any large institution that can't spell worth beans.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Your question is, "Hey, these guys who spend their entire lives predicting financial markets aren't good at predicting sports. How can we trust them to predict financial markets?"
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.
Guess it's time to upgrade their magic ball software. This time maybe they shouldn't outsource the project to Mattel.
the problem is they didn't used enought feature factors or the relevant ones (like detailed statgistics for every player, for that player with coop with another player). i didn't read the stuff but i am sure they used only few factors mostly historic data the detailed forcast would cost too much money (but they invest them into stock forecast)
That squid or octopus or kraken Paul which consistently picked the "German" mussel.
Is this a trick question??
Games are decided by refereeing as much as anything. Did they throw that into the model?
FIFA make UN look like a girlscout.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I thought the point of the stock market was that people with money can buy shares into companies they think will be profitable. i pitty these idiots who try all their best to get as rich as possible as fast as possible. and I pitty the rest of the world, who see clearly that these guys treat everything like a lottery, and still trust them.
new sig
The predictions by various teams would have had a chance of happening.
Like Argentina will beat Germany 67% of the time. There is still the possibility that Germany will win a game.
One thing that makes the world cup very unpredictable is that only a single game decides winner/loser. Anything can happen in a single game. Someone can be a little off. The ball can bounce just so. A ref can blow a call. If they played best of 5 or 7 games the predictions would have a better chance of happening.
Still we can't predict the future 100% and the world is still interesting.
To the stock market. There are to many outside influences.
Could anyone have predicted the well blow out in the Gulf and its affect on the Gulf fishing industry or 911 ? Sure they would have been outside possibilities but no one could have predicted exactly when based on just looking at the stock market.
As much as the economists like to assume that economics is a measurable science the ideas of perfect knowledge and perfect actors are laughable given the way we know people operate. The basic foundation of the economic theory is very broken.
...lots of people do it in Australia, especially in work places. Maybe you get a small prize if you guess best. Anyway one year we had this French manager who won the competition by a mile. All he had was a table of match results and a copy of excel. He was also the software metrics guru so knowing how to drive the spreadsheet helped as well.
I think the secret of his success was what he left out of his model. It wasn't smart at all. Just that when teams A and B play, what is the probability that A will win, or something simple like that.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This makes no sense. They might have been completely right that some particular team was most likely to win, but then the randomness of the game made it so that the most likely winner didn't win. We have no way to tell. To evaluate their ability to predict correctly, you would need data for how well they did over the course of many world cups. Besides, they can't possibly do better than the quality of their data and the extent to which that data actually allows to predict the outcome. E.g. if they fail to predict the outcome of a game of stone-paper-scissors, that is hardly saying they aren't good at their jobs. This summary has nothing to do with science, it's a blatant troll.
How good are they at climate prediction. I'm just wonderin'...
By having superfast computers on the floor and looking at the orders coming in, they buy and sell just before the orders execute.
This would be like observing a goal was clearly going to occur (or not occur) and then betting a goal would occur (or not occur) in the milliseconds before the goal actually occured.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Can you put this in car terms?
GS steals a car from Customer A, picks up Customer B and pays for sex, but then beats up B and takes the money back, sells a sex tape it made with B to A, then runs down A with their own car.
The banks hire actuaries by the boatload to create advanced statistical models which are then programmed in the most efficient manner in order to predict the outcome of any given event. They present the data to the sales team to sell to customers over the phone. Billions are traded every day in this manner. The only possible problem is..... that their models may not actually reflect the real world, and worse..... someone comes along and breaks the perfect statistical distribution scenario ... like "too big to fail" or "labor strike" or "stimulus package" or any of a thousand other events that breaks the standardized distribution model and pisses all over the stock ticker parade. "Bank bailout", "labor shortage", "volcano eruption", .... pick another, there are thousands to chose from. Every last one will work on the market, and they all work in concert. Oh, and as stated before, sometimes the banks just get it wrong..... the question that you really have to ask is: do they every get away from 50:50?
This tells me more about the American attitude than it tells me about football (soccer).
You can:
- Buy the best players;
- Give them the best equipment;
- Be lavish with money however you desire;
- But you can still be whipped 2-0 by some upstart team from a 3rd world nation with none of your access to wealth and resources.
No wonder so many American's can't understand football!
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
SciAm had an article I have referenced before showing the the equations for economics we incorrectly generalized from physic equations and those and been invalidated since. Economics is not a science at all.
The stock market is essentially a Markov chain. Any predictions made about it, therefore, are nothing but astrology.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
"Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win."
Gary Lineker
Can you put this in car terms?
Customer A comes to GS and says we have views on these pool of players, help us implement that view. Goldman tells Customer B they are interested in structuring a bet (that by necessity, must have another side) with the same pool. Customer B picks the players it likes, based on its own analysis and expertise. Customer A accepts the new list of players. Customer B is initially very happy, but soon the players, for which no entity involved has any influence, start performing poorly. Customer A loses. Customer B wins. Goldman, having retained some of Customer A's stake for itself, loses, but recoups a portion of the loss through fees earned by structuring the deal. All the Goldman execs then get new Ferraris.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Is /. not seeing that this is just a huge statistical game?
I've looked at a fair amount of the financial models and they are either a) statistical models that do try to gauge the market, or b) purposeful obfuscation bullshit trying to make things seem very complicated while it hides the true intent of enriching those who make them.
I have no doubt that they used A in their model for doing whatever they were trying to do by predicting the World Cup. Just in the same way all of the people in Vegas, and all over the world, have been doing for years. But when you only have a limited number of 'flips of the coin' it's never going to be perfect. Never mind the human error factor in crafting said models.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
You forgot that in the end they crash the car into A, B and the rest of the alphabet. And that the alphabet then buys them a new car - despite the fact that quite a few car makers were killed in that crash too.
Sure. Which is the odd one out - a Goldman Sachs banker, a computer salesman or a second hand car dealer?
The computer salesman - he doesn't always know when he's lying.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
But with results like 2-1 it's pretty much down to $random circumstance of the day.
My god. What are the moderators thinking?
I've been playing the game for 23 years, was trained by world-class coaches, and I'm here to tell you that you don't know what you're talking about.
Because in 80% of the matches it makes fans go "If only..."
It's part of the joy of the game, part of the culture of the game to wish and hope for your team to win. But just because a fan thinks something doesn't make it so.
this is mostly luck
If that were true, a group of randomly-chosen people would have a similar chance of winning the world cup as e.g. Germany. Which is, of course, ridiculous.
Obviously the game has a lot of problems, and some of those topics are hot today. The game arguably needs to be refined in a couple ways.
But it is absolutely *not true* soccer "isn't about making the best team win" or that it's "mostly luck". The overwhelming majority of the time, the best team *does* win. It's just that when that happens, it isn't big news.