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.
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!
This is lottery by very definition.
This is exactly the opposite of the concept of an index fund.
I must be uncreative with my consumption.
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.