Expect to see more of these in the coming weeks — the World Cup is, after all, less than a month away.

The analysts at UBS have taken a break from the sovereign debt crisis to make some World Cup “just for kicks” stock picks, and predict which team will win. Here’s what they say:

The aftershocks of the financial crisis continue to wear on investors. As we pass the parcel of debt to whoever will take it, it reminds us of a much more topical sport. We hit the pause button on sovereign fear and turn to football for some light relief as we search for World Cup winners. On 11th June, 32 teams will come together for the biggest sporting event ever to be held in Africa.

And the stock picks:

So, in addition to picking which companies it expects to outperform during the tournament UBS has also, somewhat obsessively, given them positions (note too that they’ve gone for the standard 4-4-2 formation). The substitutes on the bench are meant to be potential beneficiaries of Cup mania.

More to the point, however, the bank has had its Wealth Management team crunch some numbers on which country team will actually win the 2010 World Cup. And there’s some history here:

We note that our colleagues in UBS Wealth Management recently publishedtheir prediction of a winner (Wealth Management Research, UBS investor’s guide, April 2010) using the UBS econometric toolbox and quantitative models. During 2006, their model was applauded given it selected the winner, Italy. In addition, they managed to correctly predict 81% of the final 16, 75% of the final eight, and 50% of the semi-finalists. However, when using the model for the 2008 European Championship, the forecast winner didn’t make it to the second round. In their words, ‘the moral of the story is that one needs to be humble about the predictive power of one’s model’. While our UBS Wealth Management team have been less willing to predict the winner, we instead display below the results of their probability analysis.

So without further ado, here’s what they’ve come up with:

Ah, Brazil. A better economy and better at football. Not fair.

This entry was posted by Tracy Alloway on Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 at 11:17 and is filed under Capital markets. Tagged with Brazil, Equities, football, ubs, world cup. Edit this entry.