Forget the Super Bowl indicator, bet on the $10mn ad curse

You don’t have to make a wager to make money off a proposition bet at the Super Bowl.

You can be an investor.

Ignore the classic “Super Bowl Indicator,” which holds that the stock market will rise for the rest of the year if the winner is from the National Football Conference (bulls are cheering for the Seahawks) and decline if the winner is from the American Football Conference (short sellers love the Patriots).

That one is poppycock.

There’s a better indicator for investors to focus on, and it has to do with the second-most-popular aspect of the Super Bowl: the commercials.

The Super Bowl indictor is poppycock

New York Times sportswriter Leonard Koppett came up with the idea ahead of Super Bowl XII in 1978; to that point — from the first Super Bowl in 1967 — the indicator’s record was perfect. 

But Koppett – who later said he regretted coming up with the whole thing — did some data mining to make it happen.

The Pittsburgh Steelers are an AFC team but were part of the NFL dating back to its 1933 start, so he created a caveat that “an original NFL team” was needed; otherwise, the indicator would have failed and faded into oblivion after Steelers’ championships in 1975 and ’76. (The Steelers have won four more Super Bowls since then, all good years for the market.)

Also read: What are the Seahawks worth in 2026?

While the classic Super Bowl Indicator has a few variations, if you keep it simple with an NFC-bullish/AFC-bearish approach, the NFC team has won the Super Bowl 27 times since 1978. In 20 of those years the S&P 500 rose between the game and the end of the year.

That’s a success rate of 74%; considering that the market historically rises about three out of every four years, that means the game pretty much indicates nothing.

That becomes clearer when you consider the years when an AFC team wins the Super Bowl, which has happened 21 times since 1978.

In those years – which should have turned out bearish – the S&P 500 was actually up 18 times. That’s 86% of the time, meaning that in the years when the Super Bowl results were supposed to be bearish, the results actually were a bullish indicator.

Still, the Super Bowl Indicator has its supporters, most of them changing the criteria, trying to make the numbers sing their tune.

But if the classic Super Bowl indicator is no better a predictor of market direction than Punxsutawney Phil is of the weather, how can any investor take a real prop bet out of the game?

The secret lies not in the action on the field, but off it, in the day’s second most-watched spectacle, the commercials.

$10 million ad curse everyone ignores

Hidden in plain sight of the Super Bowl for years now is an investment anomaly that could be worth betting on: any company advertising during a Super Bowl within seven years of its IPO is headed for trouble.

I believe my indicator works best when ads are within five years of the IPO, but it holds with nearly all companies buying ads within seven years.

Also read: How much are the Patriots worth in 2026

I did not determine whether the indicator is more a jinx — a sign of trouble for a few years — or a death knell; there are companies who bought Super Bowl ads, saw their stock tank and who have since recovered.

Carvana (CVNA), for example, held its IPO in 2017 and bought its first Super Bowl ad in 2022. The stock stood at $141.35 at kickoff, but it was down to roughly $3.50 before the year is over. It’s above $400 now, so it lived the curse and survived it. Likewise, Squarespace — which advertised in 2021 before its IPO but came back in 2022 with the stock at $31.45 on game day – was more than cut in half within a year of that ad, but it wound up being sold to a private-equity firm late in 2024 for $46.50 per share.

But there are countless companies that advertised early in their public lives that never recovered.

The most infamous example from 2000 is Pets.com, where stock performance was so outrageously bad that one year later, the dead sock-puppet dog was shown in an E*Trade Super Bowl spoof ad about dot-com companies that went bust largely due to overspending on commercials. (E*Trade, which had its own IPO in 1996 and bought Super Bowl time within the jinx window, struggled mightily to get through the bursting of the internet bubble.)

LifeMinders.com — which proclaimed that its 2000 ad was “the worst commercial on the Super Bowl” — went public late in 1999, lost more than $100 million dollars but achieved a peak valuation of $2.3 billion shortly after the big game; it was sold for $68 million by the summer of 2001 and, like most of the Super Bowl ad losers, was largely forgotten.

More recently, the Super Bowl had a cryptocurrency advertising boom in 2022. FTX — now bankrupt — ran its famous “Don’t miss out” campaign featuring Larry David; the FTT token was $44.52 on game day; it’s under 32 cents today. Likewise, Crypto.com’s Cronos token did not favor the brave, its value falling from about 50 cents at kickoff to roughly 8 cents today.

Related: Sports Gambling Expansion Continues

My research here is much more focused on stocks than on crypto, and I will confess it’s more cursory than comprehensive.

I examined lists of Super Bowl advertisers for 25 years, but those lists may have been incomplete, some stocks disappeared via mergers, and I didn’t look backwards at companies that advertised ahead of their IPO, perhaps hoping to pump up the price when the stock came out.

I only researched back to the late 1990s because that’s when the price of a 30-second ad during the game went over $1 million, and I believe ad prices play a role in why this is more of a phenomenon than a coincidence.

The chutzpah and ego it takes for a start-up to spend big bucks on an ad are a big part of why I believe this phenomenon is real.

The Super Bowl is the biggest stage in the world, so there’s no better place to get your name out there.

There’s also no more expensive place. A 30-second commercial for the 2026 Super Bowl (LX) costs an average of $8 million, marking a new record high. Several spots for the NBC broadcast have sold for over $10 million, with demand driven by the game’s massive global viewership. This continues a trend of rising costs from the $7 million average in 2024 and 2025.

It’s the ultimate look-at-me moment, and it plays to the ego of the executives running hot companies. If nothing else, they get seats for the Super Bowl out of it, which they get to expense on shareholder money.

Why Super Bowl ad curse is harbinger of doom

It’s probably not a good sign for the company.

Consumer giants like Budweiser, McDonald’s and Doritos can afford Super Bowl ads to get people talking again about their products and services.

Related: Major sports TV network shuts down, leaves fans scrambling

IPOs don’t have that kind of power.

A new IPO that has some market pop – and let’s face it, those letters stand for “It’s probably overpriced” – tends to overspend. Stadium naming rights, Super Bowl ads and vanity sponsorships are fun, but not necessarily fiscally responsible, which comes to light the next time market or economic conditions change.

It’s the advertising equivalent of a Hail Mary pass, only thrown by leaders who haven’t yet figured out that the odds are that they are playing a losing game.

“If you’re spending a ton of money to buy an ad during the Super Bowl, the question is the return on investment you get for that ad,” said Charles Rotblut, vice president at the American Association of Individual Investors. “If you spend $10 million, are you going to get that much more back in revenue, versus what your return for the company might be if you invested that money into the business.

“Buying a Super Bowl ad is a bad bet for a young company,” he added, “so, yes, it would probably be a safe bet to expect those companies to have some trouble in the years after they buy an ad.”

Related: Goldman Sachs sends software stock warning amid bounce