Last week we took a look at the success of the Hula Hoop, this week I'm going to get a jump on all those articles you'll see about the impact of football's Super Bowl on the financial markets. And there is a tie-in with another toy, the Super Ball.

In the early 1960s, a scientist by the name of Norman Stingley, working for the Bettis Rubber Co. of Whittier, California, came up with a compound which he called Zectron. Zectron's main property was that it had about six times the bounce of ordinary rubber.

Well, the folks at Bettis saw no use for it, so they gave the rights to Stingley, who then took his product to Wham-O company, the same folks who made a fortune on the Hula Hoop and the Frisbee. The Super Ball, as it was quickly labeled, was released in 1965 and over the course of the decade some 20 million were sold.

But what few folks may know is the fact that the Super Ball ended up becoming the idea for the term "Super Bowl." The first two contests between the NFL and the AFL were labeled the "World Championship Game." After the second such contest, the owners were sitting around trying to come up with a snappier name when Lamar Hunt, the guiding light of the American Football League, and the owner of the AFL's Kansas City Chiefs, remembered watching his daughter play with a high-bouncing Super Ball a few days earlier and 'ball' morphed into 'bowl.' Voila...Super Bowl!

Of course many have had fun in coming up with explanations for market behavior based on the results of the Super Bowl games, the most common being that if a team from the old NFL won the contest (including AFC entries like the Pittsburgh Steelers...a former NFC team before the merger of the two leagues), then the stock market would rise. But with Denver's two victories in 1998 and 1999 (Denver being an old AFL club) and the success of the market those two years, that theory has been put to bed.

So with this in mind, I hereby present the results of the games so you can draw your own conclusions. I have included the S&P 500 return for the year, as well as the return on Intermediate U.S. Government Bonds (5-yr.) and the inflation rate as measured by the consumer price index. Nowhere else will you get all of this information in one spot, sports and stock junkies.

Note: I included 1966 just to give you a sense of the environment before the games started.

Year	Score	S&P 500	5-yr USG	CPI
1966	---------------------------------	-10.1	4.7	3.4
1967	Green Bay 35 Kansas City 10	24.0	1.1	3.0
1968	Green Bay 33 Oakland 14	11.1	4.5	4.7
1969	NY Jets 16 Baltimore 7	-8.5	-0.7	6.1
1970	Kansas City 23 Minn. 7	4.0	16.9	5.5
1971	Baltimore 16 Dallas 13	14.3	8.7	3.4
1972	Dallas 24 Miami 3	19.0	5.2	3.4
1973	Miami 14 Washington 7	-14.7	4.6	8.8
1974	Miami 24 Minnesota 7	-26.5	5.7	12.2
1975	Pittsburgh 16 Minnesota 6	37.2	7.8	7.0
1976	Pittsburgh 21 Dallas 17	23.8	12.9	4.8
1977	Oakland 32 Minnesota 14	-7.2	1.4	6.8
1978	Dallas 27 Denver 10	6.6	3.5	9.0
1979	Pittsburgh 35 Dallas 31	18.4	4.1	13.3
1980	Pittsburgh 31 L.A. Rams 19	32.4	3.9	12.4
1981	Oakland 27 Philadelphia 10	-4.9	9.5	8.9
1982	San Fran. 26 Cincinnati 21	21.4	29.1	3.9
1983	Washington 27 Miami 17	22.5	7.4	3.8
1984	L.A. Raiders 38 Wash. 9	6.3	14.0	4.0
1985	San Fran. 38 Miami 16	32.2	20.3	3.8
1986	Chicago 46 New Eng. 10	18.5	15.1	1.1
1987	NY Giants 39 Denver 20	5.2	2.9	4.4
1988	Washington 42 Denver 10	16.8	6.1	4.4
1989	San Fran. 20 Cincinnati 16	31.5	13.3	4.7
1990	San Fran. 55 Denver 10	-3.2	9.7	6.1
1991	NY Giants 20 Buffalo 19	30.6	15.5	3.1
1992	Washington 37 Buffalo 24	7.7	7.2	2.9
1993	Dallas 52 Buffalo 17	10.0	11.2	2.8
1994	Dallas 30 Buffalo 13	1.3	-5.1	2.7
1995	San Fran. 49 San Diego 26	37.4	16.8	2.5
1996	Dallas 27 Pittsburgh 17	23.1	2.1	3.3
1997	Green Bay 35 New Eng. 21	33.4	8.4	1.7
1998	Denver 31 Green Bay 24	28.6	10.2	1.6
1999	Denver 34 Atlanta 19	21.0	-1.8	2.7
2000	St. Louis 23 Tennessee 16	-9.1	12.6	3.4
2001	Baltimore 34 NY Giants 7	-11.9	8.2*	1.9*

*Lehman Int.-Term Treas. Index / CPI is Nov.-Nov.

[Source for all financial data, Ibbotson Associates. Other source: "Toys!", Don Wulffson]

Well, here are some of my own, unique conclusions. Not including this year, which certainly would appear to be negative on the equity side by the time we tally up the results in two weeks...

--In the 7 down years for the S&P 500, 6 of those years the margin of victory was less than 20 points. [Yeah, yeah, this will be shattered in 2001.]

--In the 9 years when the margin of victory was greater than 20 points, an up market was the result in 8 of them.

--If Miami or Oakland wins, look out...the market finished down all 4 years they won. [I'm not including 1984, when Oakland was 'Los Angeles,' and the market eked out a minimal gain.]

--If Pittsburgh wins...Ce-le-brate good times!

--And on a more financially oriented basis, you can see the impact when the consumer price index is above 6%. With the exception of 2000 (and 2001), all of the down years have featured this level. True, there are exceptions, but it's just a non-football way to see how inflation can negatively impact the stock market; with the competition for the investment dollar, the damage to earnings as borrowing costs rise, impact on the housing market with higher mortgage rates, etc.


Brian Trumbore

BUYandHOLD does not recommend any securities. The securities mentioned above are being used for informational purposes only and should not be regarded as an offer to sell or as a solicitation of an offer to buy.