Advice from Ryan Detrick, Carson Group's chief market strategist, certainly appears sound on this score: "Don't ever invest based on who wins the Super Bowl." Or on the coin toss, the halftime show or referee calls.
That said, he dug into the so-called Super Bowl Indicator, which "suggests stocks rise for the full year when the Super Bowl winner has come from the original National Football League (now the NFC), but when an original American Football League (now the AFC) team has won, stocks fall."
The stats are random, Detrick notes in a recent blog post, "but it turns out that when looking at the previous 59 Super Bowls, stocks do better when an NFC team wins the big game." By this measure, the stock market likely wants the Seattle Seahawks to defeat the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 60 on Sunday. Maybe.
A sportswriter discovered the indicator in 1978; at that point, it had never been wrong, Detrick wrote.
Detrick, breaking down how stocks do when the NFC wins versus the AFC, found that the S&P 500 gained an average 10.2% in the full year after an NFC team wins versus 8.1% when an AFC team wins.
This doesn't necessarily mean that investors should cheer for the Seahawks, however. Detrick noted that stocks have risen over the full year 12 of the past 13 times when an AFC team won for the past 21 years. "In fact," he wrote, "the only time stocks were lower was in 2015, when the full year ended down -0.7%, so virtually flat."
The Patriots have won the Super Bowl six times and stocks gained only 6% on average those years, Detrick pointed out. The Seahawks won only once, in 2014, and equities rose 11.4% that year. And the bigger the win, the better that stocks do.
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