Yeah, for sure. I remember once I bought tickets for a large stadium gig. The gig was postponed at a late stage, for a year, and the options were:

1) get a refund, lose the ticket you'd been lucky to get at face value back into the pool, probably never to be seen again for the same price. 2) hold onto your ticket, wait a year, go see the gig

It therefore resulted in $millions being held by the organisers for over a year - there are extremely low risk ways to gain a meaningful profit from a large amount of capital. Intentionally or not, and whether or not it was invested by them during that year, this situation turned out to be a great way to get a huge, zero-interest loan of said capital.

I'm not sure if there are laws that prevent this kind of thing from happening, but it's certainly easy money in theory.

If you're looking for something extremely low risk, you're only going to make a few percent. (I'd be thrilled to learn that I'm wrong on this.) So, may not be worth it if you have other costs or people you have to share the profit with. 3 percent of a million is only 30K.

Depends on your definition of meaningful but, I was thinking more along the lines of 10 million -> 200-300k, almost guaranteed.

Obviously if the starting capital is less, you could potentially notch up the risk of the investment etc, but that's a very meaningful profit for most companies I should think. At the least it's a very valuable individual's salary for a year.

I've never looked into treasury notes. Am I right in interpreting this graph as showing how much you would make holding treasury notes over a one year period? So roughly between . 05 and .4 percent? Point being that it's not necessarily that easy to make money holding $400k for a year?

If so, I agree with that---hence my point that it would be easier to work.