Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Super Bowl Indicator

The late Mike Epstein's musings, as told by Mike Carr. 

Mike E. pointed to the overall economy as the reason the Super Bowl indicator works. Old NFL teams, such as the Chicago Bears, Pittsburgh Steelers and Cleveland Browns, are Rust Belt cities with economies dependent upon manufacturing. The upstart AFL, when it began playing football in the 1960s, placed franchises in booming cities dependent upon the new economy – oil in Houston, technology in Oakland – or whose owners had new money fortunes like the Hess family which owned the New York Jets.



When the old economy does well, fans in those cities have good jobs and feel good about their prospects. They fill the stadiums of the home team, and fill the coffers of their teams with cash needed to sign great players to win the Super Bowl. As the new economy does better, we see their teams dominate the game, and the manufacturing companies that dominate the Dow Jones Industrial Average do worse, resulting in a bad year for stocks.

--> So, if the Jets win its a bear market?  Anyone else, including the Steelers, means bull?

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