Four Markets Face Off
Author: The editor's desk
February 13, 2025
The inaugural Four Nations Face-Off professional men’s hockey tournament is in full swing this week and next. Featuring teams from Canada, Finland, Sweden and the United States, it got us thinking what do winning teams of previous “best-on-best” showdowns in the sport have in common with stock market returns?
The easy (if not so formal) answer is zilch. There is definitively no cause and effect between the two outcomes. And that should come as a big relief for Canadian hockey fans who invest in the S&P/TSX Composite Index and might otherwise feel conflicted about cheering for the home team.
Indeed, the average return for the country’s primary equity index in years that Canada was crowned champion pales in comparison to its average historical return when they were a runner up. But that’s not all. Perhaps adding insult to injury is the fact that the S&P 500 Index in the United States and OMX Stockholm 30 Index in Sweden historically did better on average in the year their national teams won than they did in the years they finished second place.
Granted, maybe there’s a lesson in here about diversification? Diversification of investments, that is. Canadian hockey fans are happy to have best-on-best hockey championships keep piling up, eh?
Source: AGF Investments using Wikipedia and data from Bloomberg LP. as of February 13, 2025. One cannot invest directly in an index. Past performance is not indicative of future results. For illustrative purposes only. There is no cause and effect between index returns and hockey tournaments/championships.
Footnotes:
- For the purposed of this infographic, best-on-best hockey tournaments do not include the Canada/USSR Summit Series of 1972 and 1974 or annual IIHF World Championships. Olympic Games competitions before 1998 and since 2016 were also not included because professional (NHL) hockey players did not participate in them.
- Finland did not participate in the 1984 Canada Cup tournament.
- OMX Finland 25 Index was launched in 1987. OMX Stockholm Index was launched in 1989. MSCI EAFE Index was used as a proxy for these indexes prior to these years. Returns were calculated using current weightings of Finland and Sweden in the MSCI EAFE Index and applied to historical returns of the MSCI EAFE Index.
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