Super Bowl bulls

This should be an up year for stocks, at least based on the goofy-but-often-accurate Super Bowl indicator. The deal is that if an original NFL team wins the big game, the market will have an up year. If an old AFL team wins, it will be a down year. The Saints are in the NFC, of course, and the Colts started out in the NFL before switching over to the AFC. Not much suspense. The predictor had a stunning 91 percent accuracy rate in the early years, then slipped for a while, and in recent years has been mostly correct. All told, it's been right 34 out 43 Super Bowls, which means that if you actually invested in this weirdness, your return by now would be more than twice that of the S&P 500. Of course, there are all kinds of crazy stock picking indicators that mean nothing, other than statistical randomness. George W. Kester, a finance professor at Washington and Lee University, has written a paper on the subject and is interviewed this morning on NPR.