NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Want another bull market for stocks this year? Superstitious investors should pull for the Carolina Panthers to beat up on the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl in Houston on Feb. 1.

The Super Bowl stock indicator, admittedly not a sound portfolio management tool, holds that a victory in the big game by teams from the original NFL means a positive year for stocks. Meanwhile a victory for an old American Football League team means the bears will be on the prowl.

The Panthers' status as an expansion team complicates things a bit, but recent history shows that an expansion team's victory over an old AFL team -- like the Pats -- still sends a bullish signal.

The Panthers are only the second pure expansion franchise to make the game, following last year's winner, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

The Tampa Bay team was created in 1976, and played its first season in the AFC, the successor to the AFL. 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.

The key though, it seems, is that the Tampa Bay beat an original AFL team, the Oakland Raiders. In 2001, a negative year for stocks, the Baltimore Ravens beat an old NFL team, the New York Giants.

The Ravens team was 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.

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.

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"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."

In any event, the indicator itself has taken a bit of a beating in the past 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.

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Over the past 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 1999 -- 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.