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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?
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.
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.
So stop. And stop voting for the people that do as well.
There is no chance of that happening in the USA as long as the two major parties are the gatekeepers of federal elections. The "lesser of two evils" is still evil, and election after election of some kind of evil adds up to a lot of institutionalized evil.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
"No" is not the answer, Paul is. He correctly predicted the outcome of all of Germany's games so far, whichi is pretty impressive, considering Germany's loss to Serbia.
Of course, Paul is an octopus who picks the winning side by choosing the box with the winning side's flag on it.
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.
Who would ever assume that it is possible to predict any game of Association Football? When two teams have even slightly comparable skill levels, luck is the largest determining factor of any one game. The better team will probably win best out of 7, but the results of any one game are meaningless when determining who is the superior team.
Any game with such low scoring is the same way. In professional basketball it is possible to have 10-1 favorites because being superior is a far better indicator of who will win. But even in a game like baseball (with far more scoring than assoc. football on average) you usually only see odds of 4-1 at the extreme. And because of the lack of salary caps there is a far bigger discrepency between the skill levels of the best and worse teams in baseball.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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
Have they become very wealthy by investing of by tricking others into paying them to invest their money?
With stocks, the wealthiest people are generally the middle men.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
"Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win."
Gary Lineker
Economics is applied sociology. Like political science. It's just a science where the variables are largely unknown. Which males models and predictability difficult.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
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.