What Wall Street Is Saying About The Super Bowl

Having developed a model based that assigns value according to which NFL teams outperform market expectations, Los Angeles-based Analytic Investors LLC is predicting a Green Bay Packers Super Bowl victory.

The term investors use for the quantified outperforming of expectations is alpha, and according to Analytic Investors calculations, the Packers exceeded expectations less frequently during the season than the Pittsburgh Steelers this season. The firm assigned a 1.4 percent alpha to the Packers and a 28.7 percent score to the Steelers based on their internal metrics. As the Steelers overperformed throughout the season, the Packers become undervalued--and likely to give a performance in line with their seasonal averages while the Steelers experience a dropoff.

Analytic Investors has used this formula to correctly predict the last seven Super Bowl winners and eight of the last 10.

However, according to an editorial by Frank W. Slusser in Standard and Poor's, the stock market might be the biggest winner of all this year. According to the Super Bowl Predictor Theory, the S&P 500 gains for the year during years when a team with an NFL origin (teams that were not part of the AFL prior to the two leagues' merger in 1970) wins the Super Bowl, and since both the Packers and the Steelers have an NFL origin, the theory will be put to the test this year. The theory has been correct 33 out of 44 times (75 percent). Last year, after New Orleans' victory, the S&P gained 12.8 percent.