If you’re a red-blooded North American, chances are you’ll be spending your Sunday watching the action in Indianapolis where the New York Giants take on the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI.
But for a small subsector of market watchers, there’s an extra subplot of fun to the game. That’s because according to this week’s obscure economic indicator, the big game has an uncanny knack of forecasting what stock markets are set to do for the year.
A few years ago, money manager Robert Stovall of Wood Asset Management in Florida noticed a strange correlation — any time an original NFL team wins the Super Bowl, the stock market tends to go up. If an original NFL team loses, the market goes down.
It’s that simple. But the hard-to-believe indicator has an impressive track record — it’s been right in 36 of the 45 Super Bowls thus far.
There’s not really a lot of hard science to it, but a success rate like that in the topsy turvy world of financial markets tends to get noticed.
"You don’t want to invest your money based on a whimsical predictor," Stovall said recently. "But it always makes me feel better when the Super Bowl predictor points upward."
As this chart shows, the Super Bowl Index had an almost spotless record, up until the tech bubble of the late 1990s. It once again proved its mettle during the steadily bullish 2000s before fumbling again during the credit crisis.
The last time the Index fumbled was 2008, when Tom “handsome” Brady and the Patriots were on the cusp of a perfect season, if they could do away with the Giants, led by workmanlike quarterback Eli “not Peyton” Manning.
David Tyree's miraculous catch to help win the Super Bowl three years ago didn't have the positive effect on stock markets as history would indicate it could have. (Jeff Topping/Reuters)After a miraculous David Tyree catch, the Giants pulled off the upset and won 17-14. That should have meant good times for the Dow — but the benchmark went on to lose 33 per cent that year, its worst year since the Great Depression.
The Super Bowl Index is ultimately just a bit of fun, but there are some hard numbers behind the impact of the big game.
The Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis where the game will be played came with a hefty $720 million US price tag, and the face value for tickets ranges between $800 and $1,200.
But a single ticket sold on the league’s official ticket reselling website last week for $16,480. Last year, Vegas sports books took $87.5 million worth of bets on the game, and the National Retail Federation said this week that consumers are expected to spend $11 billion on Superbowl-related food, clothing and merchandise — that’s about $64 per viewer.
Economic impact
Food is a big one. The U.S.-based National Restaurant Association says one in seven Americans tend to order some sort of takeout food on Superbowl Sunday. Pizza Hut told Bloomberg this week it expects to sell two million pizzas — good enough to make Sunday the franchise’s busiest day of all time.
The impact of all that buying is very real. What Super Bowl party would be complete without chicken wings? Spot prices for the commodity tend to peak in early February because of the game, but prices have surged 52 per cent over the past 12 months to a record $1.79 a pound.
That’s almost twice the price of the bird as a whole — not bad for a food originally invented in Buffalo, N.Y. as a way of using up unwanted parts.
With money like that being thrown around, it’s clear the Superbowl has a major economic impact. But can it really predict the future? Forty-five years of history leads me to think: Go Giants.
