As surely as Fridays follow Thursdays, large lottery jackpots attract two things in abundant numbers – occasional players persuaded by the eye-popping monetary award to buy a ticket and patronizing warnings from financial writers that lotteries are a sucker's game and only fools play them. Though I'm a pretty hardcore value investor, I'm going to change things up and give some praise to lotteries.
Bad News First
Fairness demands that the negative aspects of lotteries get some air time. For starters, the odds of anyone winning a major American lottery like Powerball or MegaMillions is vanishingly small – one in at least 100 million, typically. As pointed out in some anti-lottery articles recently, your odds are much better of being hit by lighting (1 in 1,000,000), killed by lightning (1 in 2,320,000) or, if you're an American male, being Tom Cruise (1 in 150,000,000).
Read the full column here:
http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0312/In-Praise-Of-Lotteries.aspx#axzz1qWOyBQCg
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