I received this very interesting article from a good friend of mine via email. My friend’s name is John Cuilla. John is very much into researching numerous financial markets but his concentration is in precious metals. John will be a contributing writer for “Main Street beats Wall Street”, writing about all aspects of the world of precious metals. While John was reading he came across the article below. It has nothing to do with precious metals but it does have to do with the Super Bowl. Since yesterday was Super Bowl Sunday he felt it would be interesting to our readers and I agree. I copied the article and included it in this post below.
The article was written by Jonas Elmerraji. Mr. Elmerraji is a senior analyst ay Agora Financial in Baltimore and a contributor to TheStreet.
Why the Super Bowl Indicator is Smarter than Goldman Sachs
The big game is tonight.
Super Bowl 50 kicks off at 6:30 p.m. here on the East Coast. They’re guessing that more than 110 million people will tune in to watch the Carolina Panthers and Denver Broncos battle it out. I expect some of those millions of people will be watching in hopes that they’ll figure out which way the markets are heading in 2016.
According to the infamous Super Bowl indicator, a win from the NFC team (the Panthers) means that stocks are ending the year higher. A win from the AFC team (the Broncos) would be bearish.
According to my trading buddy Greg Guenthner, the brain trust at MarketWatch crunched the numbers and found that the Super Bowl indicator has an 82% win rate. Wow!
It’s even gotten the market’s direction right for the last seven straight years.
Of course, it’s still bunk.
Every year, the financial press gets some “gimme” articles out of mocking the Super Bowl indicator.
CNBC and the Wall Street Journal like to poke fun at the rubes who believe that there’s a connection between the Super Bowl and Mr. Market. The real irony, though, is that the Super Bowl indicator isn’t really any less viable than 99.9% of the “more credible” indicators you’ll see on the financial news or in the pages of the Journal.
Trying to predict where the market’s headed is a fool’s errand. When you see an economist from Goldman Sachs or BofA Merrill Lynch stroll on TV and talk about how their indicators are predicting such and such a price target in the S&P, you might as well turn the channel to the Super Bowl.
Both indicators are bogus, but at least the Super Bowl indicator has been right more often.
In a lot of ways, following the Super Bowl indicator is smarter than following any market indicator from Goldman Sachs. At least when people talk about the Super Bowl indicator, they know it’s a joke.
You probably already know where I’m going with this.
The only way to consistently make money in the long-run as a trader is by reacting to the price action, not by trying to predict what’s going to happen next. Nobody could have predicted the start to 2016 that we’d encounter – and while our market outlooks can help us hold onto some valuable context for moves in the market, trading on the real price action is what’s kept us safe from the selling blitzes along the way.
Tonight, you’ll no doubt see some great offense and defense on TV. You usually need both to win a football game.
But us, we’re just playing defense right now. And we’ll keep doing so until Mr. Market starts throwing some plays our way.
Super Bowl indicator, 82% correct, not bad! As Jonas Elmerraji says, Goldman or anyone else could never have a record like that. I do not think we should rely on “the professionals”, nor do I think we should resort to the Super Bowl Indicator or any other superstitious methods for investment advice. However, I do think we should look for investments where picking direction does not have to be pinpointed. Go to the blog and read the page on Naked Call Options. You can trade Naked Calls and be successful without picking direction perfectly. I understand not all readers have the green light to trade Naked Calls but you can study for when you do have approval.
By the way, the Denver Broncos are an AFC team….Super Bowl Indicator says bearish market.
Thank you John for bringing this interesting article to our attention.
Steve
The Options Coach