Sentiment, irrationality and market efficiency: The case of the 2010 FIFA World Cup

Soccer games create sentiment, which affects stock prices. The World Cups before 2010 provided exploitable abnormal profit which was not exploited, presumably because it was unknown. Just before the 2010 World Cup, the exploitable effect has been discovered and widely cited by practitioners who even suggested recipe how to exploit it. Indeed, the information on the abnormal profit created in 2010 World Cup a price pattern which is different from those corresponding to the previous World Cups. Like other market anomalies, we expect that market efficiency will be restored and this new effect will vanish in the future. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier Inc.