Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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!
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.
"Goldman has published an exhaustive list of defences against the allegations that it acted illegally when it allowed hedge fund Paulson & Co to choose some of the sub-prime backed securities to be included in a product it sold to investors even though it knew the hedge fund was betting against them."
The financial giants don't predict the markets, they make them.
A better analogy would be if Goldman Sachs was allowed to pick the players for each team, and put all the worst players into Brazil. Then sell all their customers bets for Brazil to win while simultaneously betting against them.
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
"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.
(Also, very few of the banks were actually "bailed out." Most were provided with a government-backed high-interest loan that they had to pay back, which many already have)
And not all of the banks wanted the loans but the government pushed it on more banks than were necessary so that the consumers would not know which banks were in need of a "bail-out." The government was worried that if we knew which banks were in need of help, we would all leave those badly run banks in favor of the banks that handled our money responsibly.
In Texas, that is actually a selling point in a number of local bank commercials "And you can rest assured that we did not accepted any government bail out money. Our customer's investments were always secure."
Too complicated. The best analogy is simply to say that GS, etc al are filled with shallow crooks who can and will trick and con everyone they meet out of every cent they have.
May the Maths Be with you!
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.
My best friend in college came from a family of bankers. They own 2 banks. The bigger of the two is still family run, but he owns more of the smaller bank, which is more of a rural community bank. Well apparently, both banks were called by the local fed branch and told to take Tarp money. The bigger bank did. The smaller bank said, "No thank you, we didn't make bad loans." Well the smaller bank has been dragged through the mud with 5 separate investigations in the last 18 months by the government. They'll hold local press conferences saying, "This bank is under investigation for violation of the Equal housing laws, or this or that". Each time, the investigations have come up empty or they've been cleared of wrong doing. But is there any press conferences about that from the feds? Nope. They didn't do anything wrong other than refuse to take the government's money and ran their bank wisely.
Apparently, if you didn't need Tarp money, the government look at your bank as though you MUST have been doing something "wrong".
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Ha! Or they had some accounting practices that they didn't want the government looking at with a fine tooth comb. The truth is, none of us will really know for certain what the real story is. Just because the guy's a friend from college doesn't mean you know the whole story. Could be true, could be 20% hedging, could be 100% pack of lies. Don't know, and neither do you.
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.