Washington & Lee University professor George Kester has a twist on Sunday’s big game, with his Super Bowl Stock Market Predictor that foresees good things for 2010.

Kester says because both the New Orleans Saints and Indianapolis Colts have roots in the original National Football League, stocks should be up this year.

The formula: if the winning team is from the old American Football League, the market will decline. Original NFL roots? Bull market ahead.

His system has put him in the media spotlight this week, quite a journey from when he attended UNC Charlotte at night to earn his master’s degree in business administration while working at first Union National Bank during the day.

Kester and wife, Karen Woody Kester, both grew up in Charlotte. He’s a 1966 Myers Park grad. She graduated from West Mecklenburg High School in 1967.

Kester’s work will be published in the “Journal of Investing,” this spring. The first such study was published in 1990, and Kester updated the findings. he found that over the course of the event’s 43-year history, the Super Bowl winner has correctly predicted whether the market will go up or down 77 percent of the time.

Kester, the university’s Martel Professor of Finance since 2000, also constructed a back-test with a beginning portfolio of $1,000 that he invested in S&P 500 stocks or Treasury bills, depending upon which team won the Super Bowl. his tongue-in-cheek strategy would have resulted in twice as much wealth as a passive buy-and-hold method, he says.

“The dollar values of the portfolios at the end of 2008 would have been $43,000 for a buy-and-hold strategy and $105,000 for the Super Bowl market-timing strategy.” – Doug Miller

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Charlotte native’s Super stock predictor