Housing cycles are supposed to be characterized by long trend intervals — long periods of ups and downs. Today our markets are behaving much like the stock market — one week up and the next week down. My guess is that depending on the news home buyers ingest during the week, they tend to react much like investors in other asset classes. This makes it more challenging to predict where the market is headed.

As a kid I grew up next to railroad tracks, and one of my joys (to the chagrin of my parents) was hopping onto slow-moving trains. In order to know when trains were coming we would put our ears on the tracks and see if we could detect the faintest of sounds to know the train was on its way. It worked for the trains; let’s see if it can work for the housing market.

I delayed finishing this report over the weekend because it was time to go to the Super Bowl party. I did this deliberately so I could let the New England Patriots and New York Giants aid us in determining which way this market is moving. The reason is that the equity markets have had an uncanny direct correlation to the housing market or visa versa for the past 11-plus years. They are tied at the hip. Whoever wins the Super Bowl, meaning which conference and which team, we can look at past Super Bowls and see how the market has performed over the ensuing year to determine which way the wind is blowing.

Going all the way back to 1967 and measuring return, it has been more advantageous when the NFC wins. The S&P 500 has been positive more often than negative (86 percent versus 63 percent of the time) with above-average market performance in the Super Bowl year (NFC wins, +16.4 percent vs. AFC wins, +7.1 percent). Since the Giants won, we have a good thing going.

Now from a team perspective, when the Giants have won, the results have been more favorable than when the Patriots have won. In the Giants’ two previous wins (1987 and 1991), the S&P rallied 17.8 percent on average. Although, when the Patriots won (2002, 2004 and 2005) the market was -2.1 percent on average.

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