Super Bowl Indicator

Sadly, Nostradamus has been dead for 500 years. So...when your tea leaves have dried up and your crystal ball is in the shop, what do you use to determine whether the stock market is about to go up or down?

Well, according to Leonard Koppett, sportswriter and major superstition aficionado, you can tell to a reasonable degree of certainty which way the market will bounce based on the results of the Super Bowl.

Okay, so he might have been half-kidding, but when Koppett proposed his future-telling system in 1978, it, made a lot of sense to a lot of people. Mostly to people who rely on astrology charts for their investing decisions, but…still. It resonated.

Back when the term was coined, the market went up 90% of the time that the NFC team won the big game…and reliably went down whenever the AFC team emerged victorious. Assuming that Tom Landry, then coach of the Dallas Cowboys, wasn’t massively investing in plastics and pharmaceuticals each time his ‘Boys brought home the trophy, there was probably nothing to it. But it sure seemed convincing.

As time would tell, the theory was proven to be as flimsy as the Houston Oilers’ front seven. Between 2007 and 2017, the Super Bowl Indicator was only 50% accurate. In other words, you might as well trust Tom Brady to predict market turns.