It was a great Valentine's Day weekend for Time Warner (NYSE: TWX). According to Boxofficemojo, the remake of Friday the 13th took the top spot, hacking up over $40 million at domestic theaters for the three-day weekend as of early estimates. Even if those estimates change a little, the horror flick is staying put in first place. Michael Bay was the producer on this film, and he brought his slick sensibility to the sick classic.

And, of course, he made sure that Jason Voorhees was prominently featured in the project, even though the supernatural serial killer wasn't the antagonist in the original source material. That was a good decision (although I do sometimes wonder what it would have been like if Bay had stayed true to the original and just used Jason's mother as the killer), considering that Jason is the heart of the brand equity of this franchise. I'll tell you, when I saw the early numbers reported at the beginning of the weekend, I was amazed at how good the business was for Friday. Every marketing cylinder was hit on this one.

J. Andrew Coutts published a paper in January 1999 which argues that stocks do better on Friday the 13th than they do on other Fridays. So you triskaidekaphobians -- those who fear the number 13 -- have one less thing to worry about today.

Coutts published his paper in Applied Economic Letters, where he tested and disproved the hypothesis that stocks do worse on Friday the 13ths than they do on other Fridays. In fact, Coutts used daily returns data from Financial Times Industrial Ordinary Shares Index (FT 30) for the period July 1935 through December 1994 to find that stock returns are higher on Friday the 13th than on other Fridays.

But Coutts wasn't satisfied with that analysis so he broke the FT 30 data into six segments -- one per decade and again concluded that there is no evidence of a Friday the 13th effect, and that once again returns on Friday the 13th tend to be higher than on other Fridays.

Does this same pattern of good investor news on Friday the 13th hold for other indices? And what about today's market? This study predicts it will do better than other Fridays. I admire the statistical rigor of the author and the spirit of scientific inquiry he displays in his paper.

And I think its silly to think that it has any implications for investors.

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter.