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1. Win the lottery

2. Spend 100% of winnings on lottery tickets

3. Win all the lotteries.

4. This is stupid.

This is exactly what I thought while reading the article, and yet, this comment made me laugh so much.

This said, as written in the article, one will likely affect the stock price when trading a large amount of shares, while buying a single good lottery ticket for all the lotteries might be more of a transparent operation.

If TheAtlantic wanted more page views they could surf on the Bitcoin hype and the trader could have bought bitcoins some day in March or April and make even more. Someone should do a similar analysis based on the cryptocurrency market, it would be equally flawed, but might still be funny.

The Atlantic's "Digital First" initiative ensures that we will see less of the magazine that has been good for the past 150 years and more of this kind of crap. They are pretty much squandering their legacy.

http://mashable.com/2011/12/19/the-atlantic-digital-first/

It seems clear to me the point is not really how much money you could have made- that's just the framing premise, or excuse, for the data they present, which is mildly interesting.

Like, for example, this chart:

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/top-daily-perf...

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