Hacker News Reader

A pretty decent SF novel on the theme is Replay.

MILD SPOILER as it happens early on.

The protagonist had access to some money and happened to know a couple of very longshot sporting bets that he was able to parlay into a good nest egg to get started.

View on HN

See also: Biff's subplot in "Back to the Future 2"

Of course, knowing a big winning Powerball jackpot is where the real returns are but it's not believable that someone would just know that while the scenario in Replay was.

The thing with the stock market is that, even going into say the dot-com era, you still need some material money to make never have to work again returns over a more modest time horizon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com