In parts One and Two of this series we looked at why the Super Bowl matter’s historically and how the stocks of the companies that advertise in it tend to perform in the future. Now its time to take a look at this year’s crop of probable big spenders.

The full list, which I put together from various sources, is here. Before writing this post, I went over the last one on the topic, and realized that although I looked at how last year’s top advertisers performed in the following year, I did not study whether all the gains came around the game itself as some kind of “Super Bowl pop”. So I took the stocks in last year’s portfolio, expanded it, and looked for a tendency for the stocks to pop from the close of trading the Friday before the big game through the following Monday’s open, Monday’s close, and the close of Friday a week later. There wasn’t much that looked statistically significant, other then a tendency for these stocks to go up during the following week despite a decline in the S&P 500, but even that was marginal. I also looked to see whether the market discounted the pop by taking the stocks higher the week before the big game, and that wasn’t the case either. The only conclusion to be made there was that the benefits of advertising in the big game, from the stocks point of view, would only be realized on a longer time frame.

So to play this tendency, does one just buy all these stocks and sit on them for a year? That is a personal question left to each individual investor. I would like to talk about a few of the more interesting names, which I will do in Part 4.

Omid Malekan