Correct, but in addition to the reasons that you mentioned, there’s another even more important one: stock markets are fairly close to being “efficient”. Without going into the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, the bottom line is that markets are SUPPOSED TO BE unpredictable (when they are working efficiently).

Because if people COULD predict which stock was going to “win the World Series” (i.e. be a big bargain that was going to shoot up in value in 2008) they’d buy it right now. And it’s price would rise, no longer making it a bargain.

That automatic feedback is what makes stock prices hard to predict: any predictive information that we have (e.g. Apple’s got good design, Toyota’s got a lead in hybrid cars, etc.) gets incorporated by the market and into the stock’s price. There is good predictive info out there, but if the market’s working right, it’s already been taken into account.

In contrast, if we have good predictive info that the Royals will likely do worse than the Red Sox in 2008, there is no market which causes the Royal’s “price” to fall and the Red Sox’s to rise, i.e. no mechanism which reacts to the info by giving the Royals an easier schedule and the Red Sox a harder one. So our predictive info retains it predictive power.

I’d guess some St. Louis fans might think his acquisition of Mark McGwire was a bigger deal…

I wonder if the Reds asked Jocketty, “What the hell were you thinking? Because if we are thinking the same thing now you were thinking then, we will pull the plug on this bad boy, pronto.”