As we all are more than aware of by now (and likely tired of hearing about it), Tiger Woods has been in the news every single day since his car accident on November 27 of this year. As a huge golf fan, I have an interest in his future as a professional athlete, rather than being tied up in his personal life. Speculation continues to linger about what truly happened then an his "transgressions" that he admitted to, but that honestly can't make us any money as traders.
What does make us money, especially being technical analysts, is being able to filter out that noise and focus on the trends when they exist. To do this, let's look at the performance of his 4 largest sponsors Accenture (ACN), Nike (NKE), AT&T (T), Gillette (PG), Gatorade (PEP) against the S&P 500 Index (SPX).
The chart below shows the return for each of those individual stocks on a percentage basis since November 27th. There are only two stocks that have manged gains during that time, ACN and NKE. At first glance, ACN is the only company to drop their sponsor relationship with Tiger, so this news has been rather bullish for their stock. But ACN didn't announce that they were dropping Tiger until December 12th. During trading this week, ACN has actually fallen -1.75% while the SPX is lower by -0.93%.
The fact of the matter is that although the Tiger Woods story is good for the tabloids and newspapers, it doesn't have much of a direct effect on the stocks of those companies. These stocks are all behaving independent of the overblown media saga that Tiger's life has become. This is all the more reason to rely on your proven technical indicators and trade based upon logic rather than emotion.