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Based on the numbers alone, that's about a 20% return for the MIT group, for an annualized return (not considering compound interest) of less than 3% per year. Does this suggest that those trying to game the lottery should just turn to investing in the market? It's amusing to see that the market, which is less structured in probability and more volatile, outperforms the lottery in this aspect.

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That doesn't mean they had that amount of capital under investment.

If you bet $10 every week, and every week you win $11, at the end of the year you've bet $520 and made a profit of $52. But you never had more than $10 "invested".

If that $18 million was evenly spread out over 7 years, it would be close to $50k/week, or $215k/month. Those are probably more accurate amounts of working capital for calculating ROI.

Yeah, the way the article phrased it, I have a feeling this is a useless statistic like the sum total of all the money spent on tickets.

The money is only tied up for a few days of the year while they hold tickets though, the rest of the time it could be sitting in a suitably liquid investment. In that sense it far outperforms the market.

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