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.