Let’s be honest, there can’t be many of us who haven’t thought about how we might spend a lottery jackpot win. As a journalist, I’ve asked several overnight-multi-millionaires over the years how their success would change their lives; I’ve probably wondered more than most how instant wealth would impact on mine.
How lottery organisers must love the photo opportunities those cheque presentations provide. They must lick their lips at the publicity the really big winners tend to generate and, of course, at the increased ticket sales and profits that inevitably ensue.
Camelot, the company that runs the UK’s National Lottery, has recently increased the number of balls in the bucket from 49 to 59, which means your chances of landing the jackpot are now even slimmer than they were. The odds of matching six numbers from 59 are one in 45,057,474.
The good news for investors is that the odds of choosing an actively managed fund — or portfolio of active funds — that will beat the market over the long term are rather better than that. But the data suggests that it’s far more of a long shot than the industry’s seductive PR and advertising tends to imply.