Winning World Cup country gets stock market bump, says Goldman Sachs

Stocks in the country that wins the World Cup outperform those of other countries by 3.5% in the month following the victory, according to Peter Oppenheimer, the head of global stock strategy at the American investment firm Goldman Sachs, speaking to French newspaper Le Monde on 12/06/2014.

The market upturn usually lasts three months. All winning countries since 1974 have experienced this bump except for Brazil in 2002, when the country was going through a major economic crisis. Brazilian shares in July 2002 were down 19% compared to the MSCI (Morgan Stanley Capital International), a global index of developing countries' stock markets.

In contrast, markets in seven of the 10 countries eliminated in the finals since 1974 have underperformed the world average by 1.4% over the same period. Overall, all ten of these eliminated finalists saw an average 5.6% increase over the first three months after the World Cup, said Oppenheimer.

The World Cup gives its host country a stock market bump of 2.7% compared to the global average in the month following the competition. As with the winning…