NEW YORK (CNN/Money) -
Want another bull market for stocks this year? Pull for the Colts and the Eagles to win Sunday's National Football League playoff games and advance to the Super Bowl.
Maybe.
The Super Bowl stock indicator, an axiom that predicts stock market performance in the coming year based on the team that wins the big game, would suggest that the bulls are in a can't lose situation if the Eagles meet the Colts in the Feb. 1 match-up in Houston.
That's because traditionally a victory by teams from the original NFL means a positive year for stocks. Meanwhile a victory for an old American Football League team, like the New England Patriots, the Colt's opponent this Sunday in the AFC championship game, means the bears will be on the prowl.
The fourth team competing this Sunday is the expansion Carolina Panthers, formed in 1995, years after the NFL and AFL merged and reorganized into one league with two conferences - the NFC and AFC.
It is only the second pure expansion franchise to make the game, following last year's winner, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It's not clear how the indicator works in the case of expansion teams, for reasons to be explained in more detail below.
Of course it's safer to be wandering around the line of scrimmage without protective gear than it is to base investment decisions on the outcome of a football game. But that doesn't stop the football fans who populate the brokerages firms of Wall Street from talking about the indicator.
"Wall Street has a lot of football fans," says Jeff Hirsch of the Stock Trader's Almanac. "The Super Bowl indicator might be fun, but I'd put more credence into astrologic market predictors. Any correlation between the stock market and the Super Bowl that can be dug up is just coincidental. There's no way the outcome of the football game has any effect on the stock market."
Indicator recent record weak
The indicator has taken a bit of a beating itself in the last few years, though. For the first XXXI years of the game, it was right XXVIII times, or 90.3 percent of the time. But it's been in a slump since the 1997 game -- the type of slump bad enough to get an NFL coach fired. Over the last five games the indicator has had only one clear victory - when the AFL-born Patriots' 2002 victory was followed by the third straight year of the bear market.
The last two years of the last bull market - 1998 and 99, followed victories by the old AFL Denver Broncos, while start of the bear market in 2000 followed a victory by the NFL-born St. Louis Rams.
The performance of the indicator in 2001 and 2003 is tougher to nail down.
In 2001 the winner was the Baltimore Ravens, a team created by the move of the old NFL Cleveland Browns. But the NFL has ruled that the Ravens are a new team, while the expansion Cleveland Browns count as the original NFL team in terms of franchise records. So the bear market that followed the AFC's Ravens' victory might count as a success for the indicator, especially since they beat an old NFL team, the New York Giants.
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The Tampa Bay team was created in 1976, and played its first season in the AFC, the successor to the AFL. So it could be argued that the team's win should have extended the bear market run. But it has spent all but that first year in the NFC, as was the plan when it was created, so it clearly has an NFL flavor to its history. And the team beat an original AFL team, the Oakland Raiders, so maybe the end of the bear market could have been seen in the game's result.
Thus if the expansion Panthers can score an upset win in this year's Super Bowl, the indicator might ride more on which opponent - the AFL's Patriots or the NFL's Colts - goes down to defeat.
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