If this Sunday's Super Bowl is like many past ones, the ads may be a lot more entertaining than the game. But if history is any guide, investors would be better off betting on the final score than investing in the companies that place the most expensive commercials on TV. The average cost of a 30-second ad is back above $2 million this year, a level not seen since those prices, like the Dow, peaked in January 2000.

With help from researchers at the Leuthold Group, we created the Wall $treet Week Super Bowl Index to track a portfolio of sponsors' stocks. For each year since 1998, we created a group of publicly-traded advertisers for the Super Bowl, with each company weighted by how much advertising it bought -- the more Super Bowl ad minutes, the larger its proportion of the overall index for that year.

And if you had invested in that index for the past five years and adjusted the portfolio every January for a new crop of Super Bowl advertisers, you would have lost almost 27 percent annually, on average. That’s much worse than the S&P 500, which lost only about 9 percent.

Super Bowl	W$W Index performance	Biggest gainer	Biggest loser	S&P 500 performance
XXXII (1998)	24.6 percent	Anheuser-Busch (+ 49%)	Starwood Hotels (Westin) (- 61%)	26.7 percent
XXXIII (1999)	-0.5 percent	American Express (+ 62%)	Progressive Insurance (- 57%)	19.5 percent
XXXIV (2000)	-25.6 percent	Anheuser-Busch (+ 28%)	MicroStrategy (- 91%)	-10.1 percent
XXXV (2001)	-2.0 percent	E*Trade (+ 39%)	TMP Worldwide (Monster.com) (- 22%)	-13.0 percent
XXXVI (2002)	-19.2 percent	Anheuser-Busch (+7%)	AT&T Wireless (- 61%)	-23.4 percent

The index's biggest booster is also the largest Super Bowl advertiser over the 5-year period, Anheuser-Busch. Its stock rose more than 120 percent during that time. Pepsi, the second-largest advertiser, was up more than 16 percent in the past five years.