Roughly 50% of Americans still buy a lottery ticket at least once a year, even though there’s a minuscule one in 292 million chance of winning the Powerball jackpot. Many of those players likely buy lottery tickets as a habit instead of anticipating life-changing gains, but those losses still stack up. It costs $730 per year to buy a standard Powerball ticket for $2 every day, and even winning smaller prizes by matching fewer numbers probably won’t offset those costs.Meanwhile, only 21% of U.S. families directly hold individual stocks that aren’t passively held in a mutual fund, index fund, or retirement account. Yet as the Wharton finance professor Jeremy Siegel once said, the stock market is the “greatest wealth creator of all time."Image source: Getty Images.Continue readinghttps://www.fool.com/investing/2025/09/01/thinking-playing-the-lottery-invest-in-ionq/
No jobs report again. But these numbers show how the U.S. economy is doing.
November 1, 2025
Investors are set to miss out on the second U.S. jobs report in a row due to the government shutdown, but there’s enough scattered evidence to suggest the economy is hanging in there.
