$100 Invested in 100 $1 Lottery Tickets

You should look at EV (expected value), not odds of winning.<p>Here are some cautions:<p>(1) A decent amount of the EV for lottery tickets is likely in large prizes, and your return will be quite variable unless the number of tickets you buy is about the same magnitude as the odds of winning the rarest prizes<p>(2) Win tables don't count taxes, but your actual winnings will be taxed if large; so your effective EV (including taxes) will be less<p>(3) +EV lottery tickets are theoretically possible for "jackpot" lotteries like powerball if you only play when the jackpot is sufficiently large, but see (1) and (2) before you conclude it's a way to make free money.

Something I wish they took into account was diversity in locations. I'm not sure it would matter, but buying ALL 100 tickets from the same store is probably not the same odds as buying them in chunks from different stores.<p>My thinking is: lottery ticket producers will never produce 100 winning tickets in a row, but they will most likely produce many losing tickets in a row because they expect, at most, 3-5 being bought at once.<p>But I could be just out of my element.

haha -59% is a horrible rate of return. not an investment i'll be making any time soon.