I never really understood this argument. I mean, you can daydream for free about Warren Buffet choosing you at random to give $300 million to, or inheriting a distant relatives belongings and finding a Pollock in there.

Maybe with the lottery its easier for people to deceive themselves about the actual odds?

I imagine the odds of winning the lottery, as low as they are, are significantly higher than Buffet giving you $300M.

It's not deceiving yourself to recognize that miniscule odds are greater than zero.

Not sure why you think it would be 0%; people have stumbled across $15 million Pollock paintings by accident[1]. William Durkin happened to be at the right place at the right time to save Howard Hughe's life, and it looks like he was at least offered money afterwards[2]. There's plenty of other stories where something extremely unlikely happens and someone gets rich.

The likelihood of winning the Powerball is something like 0.000000005%. Not sure what the odds are of these other unlikely events, but even if they're less likely - you really think someone is able to daydream about a 0.000000005% chance but not a 0.000000000005% chance?

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/12/us/lost-jackson-pollock-painti... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes#Near-fatal_crash...

The kind of fantasy you're describing isn't an equivalent good. People buying lotto tickets are fantasizing, amongst other things, on not being dependent on the largesse of others.

I play every once in awhile, when the jackpot gets to be large enough they start talking about it on TV. The $10 or $20 I spend is well worth daydreaming about the things I would if I won.

Buy index funds and live off the proceeds?

I don't know about you, but I can't live off the proceeds from $10 in index funds. Not even if repeated 100 times.

The general principle here is right, but I was kind of curious about exactly what your gains would be.

I curled the last 90 days from http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3021-gainnyse-gainer... and if you selected the largest percentage gainer every day for the past 100 days, given you started with $10, you'd have about 828 million after 90 days. (It's worth noting however with 2,800 stocks on the NYSE, that 2800^100 is much longer odds than winning the lottery. Actually, your odds of selected the very highest percentage stock gainer three days in a row are lower than your odds of winning the powerball, assuming such a thing is random).

Unrelated, this has really been a winning quarter for logistics and trucking companies!

>>if you selected the largest percentage gainer every day for the past 100 days, given you started with $10, you'd have about 828 million after 90 days.

This is lottery by very definition.

> if you selected the largest percentage gainer every day for the past 100 days

This is exactly the opposite of the concept of an index fund.

I was talking about the daydreaming of what to with the winnings.

I must be uncreative with my consumption.

Oh. I totally misread your post as advocating putting the money into an index fund instead of buying lottery tickets.

Actually, retiring on the winnings is pretty much what I'd do, too. Though I'd want to diversify holdings over more asset classes than just index funds. When you just want to coast on passive income, it's fair to say even index funds are too risky to put everything in.

Why not both?

In Georgia the lottery-funded state school near-full scholarship is called HOPE.

I've seen a story about it being the only readily and quickly accessible thing approaching small scale investment for people.