Steelers in Super Bowl may bring luck to investors

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Win or lose on Sunday, having Pittsburgh in the Super Bowl could be a good luck charm for the U.S. stock market, according to a light-hearted analysis done to coincide with the biggest NFL game of the year.

Since the first Super Bowl was contested in 1967, the average annual return for the S&P 500 index has been 25 percent in the six years the Steelers competed, regardless of whether the team won or lost, according to Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor's.

The Steelers, who play in the NFL's American Football Conference (AFC), are one of three teams to have won the Super Bowl five times. Their lone loss came in 1996.

The team's record for equities runs at odds with overall Super Bowl records. The average S&P 500 return has been higher when a National Football Conference (NFC) team wins rather than an AFC team, by 15 percent to 6.3 percent.

The Steelers' NFC opponents on Sunday, the Arizona Cardinals, have never played in the Super Bowl. The team was first established in Chicago, and based in St. Louis for almost 30 years before moving to Arizona for the 1988 NFL season.

Statistically, having Sunday's big game in sunny Tampa, Florida, suggests a decent year for the stock market, according to Capital IQ's number-crunching.

In the 13 years the Super Bowl has been played in Florida, the average S&P return is 14.2 percent. Years in which the game has been played in non-dome stadiums tended to see better returns that those in domed stadiums -- and retractable domes have been plain bad luck.

Looking at betting lines, in years where the "over" bet was a winner, the average S&P return was much higher than years when the "under" bet prevailed, the analysts said.

The latest line for Super Bowl XLIV shows Pittsburgh as a 6.5-point favorite.

Urban legends have circulated for years about the predictive power of the Super Bowl result for the U.S. stock market

In 2007, economist Michael Munley, then with the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank, noted that for more than two decades, the team that won the game represented the city with the lower unemployment rate.

That measure has now worked in 17 of the past 24 years. For 2009, it would favor the sun-belt Cardinals, based in Phoenix, Arizona, over the rust-belt Steelers.

(Editing by Gary Crosse)