Key Takeaways
- The Super Bowl Indicator, which claims an NFC win predicts a rising stock market that year, proved correct in 2025: the Eagles won, and the S&P 500 gained almost 18%.
- Don’t let that fool you. Since 2000, the indicator has been right less than half the time.
If your portfolio could take a rooting interest in Sunday’s Super Bowl, it would pick the Seattle Seahawks.
That’s according to the Super Bowl Indicator, a bit of Wall Street folklore that suggests wins by National Football Conference teams predict a good year for the stock market while American Football Conference victories spell trouble. Seattle, representing the NFC, faces the New England Patriots on Feb. 8 in Santa Clara, Calif.
If you buy the theory, a Seahawks win in Super Bowl LX—or 60, if you prefer—means a good year for stocks. A Patriots victory, the story goes, means stocks will fall.
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Traders have all kinds of adages, most of them based on fairly straightforward historical data: Stocks tend to rise or fall, they observe, over a given time period, when viewed through a particular lens, like the summer break or the Christmas holiday. None of them are absolute locks, but several can seem convincing over time—which if nothing else, can make them fun.
The football indicator, it turns out, worked last year. The Philadelphia Eagles, an NFC team, beat Kansas City 40-22 in Super Bowl LIX, and the S&P 500 gained almost 18% in 2025. But before you place any bets—on the game or in your 401(k)—consider this: Since 2000, the indicator was right only 46% of the time. You’d do as well to flip a coin.
So, who’s expected to win this time? Recent sportsbook odds suggest that the betting public favors the Seahawks. Same goes on prediction markets sites Kalshi and Polymarket.
The Indicator’s Origins
Sports writer Leonard Koppett had the idea in 1978 for The Sporting News after spotting the pattern had held for 11 of the first 12 Super Bowls. Not a financial journalist, Koppett wanted to point out a fun coincidence, not give investment advice.
“I meant the whole thing as a satire on the fallibility of human statistical reasoning,” Koppett told the Wall Street Journal in 2001. “It’s too stupid to believe.”
Stupid or not, the indicator kept working. Through the late 1990s, it had a success rate above 90%. Full-year returns for the index were also slightly better when NFC teams won, according to Carson Investment Group data.
Like Most Coincidences, the Indicator Worked Until It Didn’t
Every spurious correlation looks like prophecy until it doesn’t. For decades, it did for the Super Bowl indicator.
Then came the dot-com bust, and the indicator’s hot streak was over. Over the past 20 years, the indicator was correct just 8 times, a 40% success rate.
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In 2008, the New York Giants beat the Patriots—an NFC win, supposedly a bullish omen. Six months later, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and the S&P 500 lost 37% of its value. In 2023 and 2024, the Chiefs won back-to-back titles, supposedly bearish signals, yet the market gained more than 24% both times.
Last year broke the losing streak. But there’s no mechanism connecting football outcomes to stock prices, and one correct prediction can’t defeat the iron law that correlation doesn’t equal causation.