[jasode]

>Banks make no money on predictions. They make money on flows and taking spreads on trades they do with clients.

You're mostly right but to further clarify, an investment bank like Goldman Sachs has revenue from mostly "market making" spreads but it does also have activities that depend on predictions such as their proprietary trading (before the Volcker Rule shut them down) and their GSAM (Goldman Sachs Asset Management) fund. The GSAM is basically a hedge fund for their wealthy clients' money. They will run predictions on macro trends on data like interest rates, commodities, indexes, etc to help them pick stocks for their portfolio.

As the pdf noted, the World Cup data models and simulations came from Adam Atkins of GSAM.

[anonu]

The Volcker Rule shutdown approximately 0 amount of proprietary trading on wall street. Any articles you can point me to were merely media stunts by their respective firms.

The rule was too complex and onerous to be implemtable. Case in point, it's already being rolled back... Certainly because of the current administration we're in. But more because it was just a poorly written and thought out idea to start with.