Wow! After weeks without a winner, there were three winners in last night’s Powerball lottery. Congrats to the winners!

Powerball is a bad bet and an even worse investment. We can all run the math. The WSJ did a nice visual comparing the odds of winning Powerball to other odds. A one in 292 million chance of winning is inconsequential. [As an aside, a 1 in 112 chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident is scary and something we’ve got to improve.]

What was unusual about this Powerball drawing is that the NPV of an investment in a ticket was not far from break-even. There are a lot of practical and technical reasons that made it less than break-even, including the prospect of multiple winners, taxes…