PAN PYLAS
Associated Press
LONDON (AP) — It’s not just Argentine soccer fans who woke up depressed following their nation’s 1-0 defeat to Germany in the World Cup final. Traders in Buenos Aires were also feeling blue.
Though Argentina’s main Merval index closed up 0.2 percent on Monday, it traded sharply lower for much of the session after the team succumbed to a late goal Sunday from German striker Mario Goetze in Rio de Janeiro.
Despite the late advance, the Merval underperformed other markets in the region and around the world, notably Germany’s DAX, which closed 1.2 percent higher — the biggest gain Monday among the major European stock indexes.
The underperformance was widely anticipated.
Alex Edmans, a professor at London Business School and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has analyzed stock market responses to World Cup defeats and found those from losing nations have underperformed.
“Over the course of the World Cup, there have been 39 losses by countries with an active stock market,” he said. “In two-thirds of these cases, the national market has underperformed the world market on the next day.”
According to Goldman Sachs, the depressed mood may weigh on Argentine shares for a while to come.
In a report prior to the World Cup, the bank said that since 1974, most nations that lose in the final underperform for a month as traders suffer “a post-final bout of the blues.”
Overall, it found that the victorious countries’ stocks outperformed the global market by 3.5 percent in the following month. Seven of the nine losing finalists, on the other hand, underperformed by 1.4 percent.
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