World Cup 2010

Market has been pretty quiet recently which is expected due to the world cup season. . low volume and low trading range. . Received a report today from J.P. Morgan sent to me by my team leader and guess wat... It was a 69 pages report on quantitative analysis of World cup 2010. Now wat, even the banks are diverting their attention to the world cup.. hmmm...... looks like I should join the crowd and share the information with my readers.


England won nine of their 10 matches in qualifying to progress to the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa™ in some style, with Wayne Rooney scoring nine goals in the process.

Fabio Capello picked up the pieces following Steve McClaren's ill-fated spell in charge that had seen England miss out on a place at UEFA EURO 2008. The Italian suffered no such problems, though, and England head into South Africa 2010 with confidence high following a successful qualification campaign which saw them top Group 6.

Their only defeat - a 1-0 loss against Ukraine - came in the penultimate group game. In total, England scored 34 goals in their 10 qualifiers and conceded just six.
http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/news/newsid=1222660/index.html#nine+days

The world cup will start on the 11th June and end on the 11th July...

J.P. Morgan has predicted the following outcome based on a few parameters.

Winner of world cup: England

Second: Spain

Third: Netherlands

Quant analysis is a practice often considered as “too complex” by a large part of the investment community.

In this document we explained that, on the contrary, Quant is far from complex as Quants merely try to remove human based opinions when they make investment decisions.
Instead they use information and data points they consider relevant to investment in a systematic and efficient manner. Once they have found data sets thought to exert influence over future returns, they backtest them and make sure they can be used on a day-to-day basis to generate alpha.
As Quants use only numerical/statistical data for their market analysis, it seemed that sound Quant/mathematical Models could be used in fields outside Finance to make
accurate predictions.
With the amount of statistical information now available for Football fans, we thought it would be a very fruitful ground for investigation. We therefore decided to “translate” our successful stock-picking Quant Model and adapt it to predict the outcome of the World Cup matches and ultimately provide the World Cup winner.
As explained in the document, we focused on very intuitive data (comprising recent team performance, FIFA ranking, probability to win etc). Ultimately, we used our mathematical Model and applied it on a match by match basis and predicted winners.
Whilst our Model points towards Brazil as being the strongest team to take part in the World Cup, our “World Cup Wall Chart” indicates that thanks to the actual fixtures determined by the schedule, we believe England will be the winner of the 2010 World Cup.

We also highlight that the 3 favourites according to both our model and market prices (Brazil, Spain and England) offer a combined probability of 52.5% of winning the World Cup (as per prices on 30 April).

-J.P. Morgan-