Zinger Key Points
- The Super Bowl Indicator was invented in 1978 and predicted stock market performance based on which conference wins the game.
- Recent data shies away from the Super Bowl Indicator. Here's who Wall Street could be rooting for in 2025.
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The Super Bowl Indicator has been a nonscientific predictor of how the S&P 500 will fare based on which team wins the Super Bowl.
Here's a look at the indicator and why past history shows that bulls may be rooting against the gauge this year.
What Happened: The Super Bowl Indicator was coined by New York Times sportswriter Leonard Koppett in 1978. Based on Koppett's indicator, bulls will be rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles to beat the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX.
Koppett predicted that an NFC team winning the Super Bowl would indicate a bull market and a win by an AFC team would indicate a bear market. This was based on the indicator being right for years before he coined the term.
For years, the Super Bowl Indicator was pretty accurate, but in recent years hasn't produced the same winning results. This means bulls may actually want to root for the Chiefs to complete their "three-peat" and be the first team to win three straight Super Bowls.
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Why Wall Street Is Rooting For Chiefs: Ryan Detrick, chief market strategist at Carson Group shared several data points that point to Wall Street rooting for a Chiefs win.
For starters, stocks have been up 12 of the past 13 times an AFC team won, which reverses the very thesis of the Super Bowl Indicator.
Detrick also points out that teams from Philadelphia winning a World Series or Super Bowl leads to bad things for the stock market.
Here is a list of the last World Series (Philadelphia Athletics, Philadelphia Phillies) and Super Bowl (Philadelphia Eagles) wins by Philadelphia teams and what happened.
- 1910: Athletics – Panic of 1910-1911, 25% bear market
- 1911: Athletics – Panic of 1910-1911, all 12 months recession
- 1913: Athletics – Another recession
- 1929: Athletics – Crash of 1929
- 1930: Athletics – The Great Depression
- 1980: Phillies – Double dip recession of early 1980s
- 2008: Phillies – The Financial Crisis
- 2018: Eagles – Stocks worst year since 2008
While stocks had one of their worst years in recent history when the Eagles won in 2018, the recent success of the Chiefs has turned into strong market returns.
The Chiefs have four Super Bowl wins and the S&P 500, which is tracked by the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY, has averaged a 15.9% return when they win the Super Bowl. This ranks fifth of the 22 Super Bowl winning teams, while the Eagles rank 17th.
The three most recent Chiefs wins and the S&P 500 returns are below:
- 2020: +16.3%
- 2023: +24.2%
- 2024: +23.3%
Freedom Capital Markets chief global strategist Jay Woods said the Super Bowl Indicator is a "fun but flawed piece of trivia." He said the recent success of the Patriots and Chiefs has evened out the indicator for the AFC and NFC.
"As for this matchup and market correlation, the Chiefs may be the choice of the bulls. In the six years they have appeared in the big game the market is up five of those six times with the only decline being after their 1970 victory in which the market fell by a measly -0.1%. The average annual gain after a Chiefs appearance is 18.45%," Woods wrote in his weekly newsletter.
Woods, who is an Eagles fan, said the market is not a fan when his favorite NFL team goes to the Super Bowl.
"In their four appearances the average return in the S&P 500 is 4.02%. Their lone victory came in 2018 and the market sold off a total of 10% in the week before and after their victory. The market was lower for the year by -6.2%."
Other Data Points: One data point from Detrick that would have Wall Street rooting for an Eagles win is the overall Super Bowl history. Detrick noted that of the 58 Super Bowls, the AFC and NFC have each won 29 games. The average S&P 500 return is 9.1% with 42 years up and 16 years down.
When an NFC team wins, the average return is 10.0% with 22 years up and seven years down, good for 75.9% of NFC winning years producing positive returns.
When an AFC team wins, the average return is 8.1%, with 20 years up and nine years down, good for 69.0% of AFC winning years producing positive returns.
For those who don't care who wins the Super Bowl, but still want strong market returns, there's an angle there as well. Bulls should root for a blowout in the Super Bowl.
The average return for the S&P 500 is 9.1% in the Super Bowl era. Here's a look at how the winning margin of the Super Bowl impacts returns.
- 21 point win or more: S&P 500 up 13.6%
- Double digit win or more: +10.9%
- Single digit win: +6.5%
The S&P 500 was higher 84.6% of the time when a Super Bowl had a win by 21 or more points, compared to 79.4% of the time with a double digit win and 62.5% of the time with a single digit win.
The last two double-digit Super Bowl wins were in 2021 and 2014 with the S&P 500 up 26.9% and 11.4% respectively.
Adding everything up would mean that bulls would be rooting for the Kansas City Chiefs to win by 21 points or more.
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