Super Bowl indicator - get ready for the return of the bears - Feb. 1, 2004
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Patriots win ... bulls lose?
According to Super Bowl indicator, AFL-born Patriots' win
means a return of bears to Wall Street.
February 1, 2004: 10:30 PM EST
By Chris Isidore, CNN/Money senior writer
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NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The Patriots' Super Bowl 32-29 win might
be good news for New England sports fans, but it'll probably make
superstitious investors pretty nervous.
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Super Bowl indicator - get ready for the return of the bears - Feb. 1, 2004
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That's because the Super Bowl stock indicator, admittedly not a sound
portfolio management tool, holds that a victory in the big game by teams from
an old American Football League team means the bears will be on the prowl.
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After a better than 90 percent success rate the first XXXI years of the game,
the indicator has had a rougher record in recent years. Unfortunately the one
year since the 1997 game that is was clearly correct was 2002, when the
Patriots' first Super Bowl victory was followed by a 30 percent drop in the
Standard & Poor's 500 index that year.
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."
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.
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.
Last year's winner, the Tampa Bay
Buccaneers, 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.
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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.
For more on the
business of sports, click
here
original NFL team in terms of
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
franchise records.
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Super Bowl indicator - get ready for the return of the bears - Feb. 1, 2004
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