Can Investing Give You the Returns That the Lottery Likely Never Will?

Forget scratch-offs—your portfolio's pumping harder than a DeFi yield farm on launch day.

The Math That Actually Adds Up

Lottery odds stack worse than a bear market cascade—you're more likely to get struck by lightning while adopting a three-legged dog. Investing? That's compounding doing the heavy lifting while lottery tickets collect dust.

Volatility Versus Vanishing Acts

Market dips recover faster than crypto Twitter after a FUD campaign. Lottery winnings? Poof—gone faster than a shitcoin rug pull. Smart money builds positions, not dreams.

The Long Game Always Wins

Consistent beats flashy every time. Dollar-cost averaging mints millionaires while lottery addicts fund state budgets. It’s not sexy, but neither are retirement account statements—until they are.

Because let’s be real: lotteries are just a tax on people who failed statistics class.

Image source: Getty Images.

The odds are stacked

According to Powerball, the overall odds of winning a prize are about 1 in 25. And the prize with the best odds is the lowest prize at $4. In other words, one would need to spend about $50 in lottery tickets just to hope to win something. And chances are you would only win $4.

Put a different way, the most likely outcome is that someone playing the lottery would spend $50 and be left with $4. In investing terms, this would amount to a loss of over 90%.

Sure, it's possible to beat the odds. There are people who win it big on the very first try. But it's statistically improbable. Moreover, there isn't anything a person can do to improve their odds -- beating the odds would just be dumb luck. And luck isn't a repeatable process. Therefore, if a person continues to play the lottery, their returns will eventually get closer and closer to the overall odds of the game.

Isn't the stock market just a casino?

The lottery and the stock market have one thing in common: The future is uncertain. But I believe the similarities end around there. At a casino, the odds are stacked against the gambler -- the house always wins, as they say. But in the stock market, the odds tend to be stacked in investors' favor.

Consider that thehas gained about 10% annually for over 50 years. And the market is up more frequently than it's down. If a casino offered a game that won more than it lost, gamblers would line up to play -- especially if their money increased by 10% on average, even after factoring in their losses.

A simple way for investors to win this "game" is to just put money into an S&P 500 index fund, which will earn the same as the index, minus any fees.

Consider that the average American spends $321 annually on lottery tickets, according to Motley Fool research. Over 50 years, that's just over $16,000. As mentioned previously, the odds are high that lottery players will lose more than 90% of this. In other words, they'd only have around $1,600 with this approach.

By contrast, if an investor put $321 in an S&P 500 index fund and added $26.75 monthly (which works out to $321 annually) for 50 years, this would be worth over $400,000, assuming a 10% annual return. That's not a typo.

It gets better

The above example is what could happen if an investor simply settled for average returns. But picking individual stocks could allow for above-average returns.

This is where some might say that the market is a casino. But I disagree. Consider that the worst stock in the S&P 500 in 2024 was(WBA), which dropped 61% for the year. So even if one only purchased one stock, and it happened to be the worst possible choice, it would still be better than a lotto ticket.

Moreover, a total loss in the stock market is rare, and Walgreens wasn't a total loss. In fact, Walgreens' stock is up 28% in 2025. But lottery tickets lose 24 out of 25 times and don't give you a second chance.

Meanwhile, top stocks in the S&P 500 can return much better than this in a given year. For example, shares of(PLTR -0.82%) have more than doubled in 2025. And by learning to identify good opportunities, it's possible to pick above-average stocks such as this more often than not.

In conclusion, the odds are you will never become wealthy by playing Powerball -- I'm sorry to say. But the odds of achieving life-changing wealth are high if one invests in stocks over a long period of time. It's rare to find a lottery winner among the top 1% of wealthy Americans. But wealthy Americans do understand the power of investing, considering they own over half of the stock market's value.

It may not be as exciting as winning a billion-dollar jackpot. But it's smart to double down on investing -- where the odds are at least somewhat stacked in your favor.