And finally…bank deploys analysts to find most likely World Cup winners
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With the domestic football season mostly drawing to a close over the weekend, thoughts will now be turning to the rapidly approaching World Cup in Russia, and UBS has wasted no time in delving into the prediction game.
Forecasting the winners of major athletics and football tournaments is a popular sport among the analyst community and the Swiss investment bank has deployed a team of 18 analysts running 10,000 simulations to determine the likely winner of next month’s tournament, with Germany emerging top of the pile.
The experts at UBS ran a Monte Carlo simulation, crunching a large number of random variables to achieve the overall rankings.
Perennial World Cup winners Germany were given a 24 per cent chance of raising the trophy at the end of the month-long tournament, with Brazil coming in second on 19.8 per cent and Spain in third on 16.1 per cent.
So far, so obvious.
More surprising, however, is the trajectory of hapless under-achievers England, who are handed the fourth place berth and an eight per cent chance of lifting the urn.
Mark Haefele, Chief Investment Officer at UBS Global Wealth Management, said: “No matter whether they are analyzing global markets or soccer tournaments, people tend to be biased towards local favorites. The same quantitative discipline that the Chief Investment Office applies to investments has proven useful in successfully looking beyond a home bias in portfolios and sports events.”
Read the full report here 
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