Were you rooting for San Francisco last night? If you are an investor, you probably should have been, at least according to the Super Bowl indicator.

This stock market predictor looks to match up NFL conferences and equity performance for a calendar year. If an NFC team wins the big game, markets will be in the green. And if an AFC team is triumphant, markets will go down over the course of the year.

Last night, Baltimore, the AFC winner, prevailed suggesting a weak year for stocks in 2013.

Obviously it shouldn’t matter to stocks which team wins the game, but the indicator has been surprisingly accurate over the years. Of the 46 previous Super Bowls, the prediction has been right for 35 of them, or roughly 76% of the time.

While part of this is thanks to the market’s upward bias and traditional NFC dominance over the years, it is still a pretty high rate of accuracy. Furthermore, some statisticians put the probability of this happening at less than 2% so there might be something to the idea after all.
 

What do you think of the Super Bowl indicator?

Is there a different indicator that you like to watch (even if it is kind of crazy like this one)?

Let us know in the comments below!

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