Any fool can make a million dollars or more by buying a lottery ticket.
The odds of winning any amount at the lottery hovers around 1/40 while the odds of winning the jackpot are around 1/200,000,000.
The ticket is only a dollar and you stand to lose 100% of your capital ($1) while you stand to win anywhere between $1 and $20 Million, sometimes more.
So the risk profile for this strategy is (-100%,+2,000,000,000%) with odds (1/40-1/200,000,000).
If you buy two tickets every week for 5 years, it will cost you 2 x 52 x 5=$520.
Overall, your odds of making at least a million dollar are still slim:
(The odds of making at least 1 million dollar with 1 ticket is not much different from winning the jackpot).
2 x 52 x 5 x (1/200,000,000) = 1/384,615.
This is assuming you don't buy more than 2 tickets every week even if you win $500 one day.
If you decide to re-invest that $500, the odds will be slightly higher but not by much. At one end of the spectrum, you could buy 3 tickets every week for the rest of the 5 years, increasing your odds by a tiny amount.
At the other end of the spectrum you could buy 500 extra tickets for a single drawing to increase your odds to 1/400,000 once.
This is interesting because winning $500 is within the 1/500 odds at each drawing, so within 5 years, it's likely you might get $500 at least once.
Notice that by buying all these extra tickets, you're not even raising your odds to the overall odds 1/384000 over 5 years.
The other obvious strategy is to buy $500 tickets once and play those 1/400,000 on a single drawing. If you lose, you're broke and you can't play anymore.
This discussion is helpful because it highlights four very distinct aspects of investing:
1- How much of your capital is at risk at any time.
2- The strategies you can use when you have some returns.
3- The overall odds of the game
4- How locked-in you are to those odd.
Touching those points, lottery-investing is a pretty sorry game because your capital is split between what you have left over in cash, and what is 100% at-risk, the strategies when you have winnings don't improve your odds by much because the odds are fixed and tiny.
Tomorrow we'll talk about Craps.
