There is a recent article on CNN profiling Brad Duke who won the $220 million dollar power ball in 2005, unlike most lottery winners it looks like he has a somewhat solid plan for his money and didn’t just go blow through it in the first few years. He has a plan to grow his $85 million (that’s what he got after taking lump sump and paying taxes) to $1 billion dollars by 2014 and has currently grown it to $128 million while still giving over $1.3 million to his charitable organization, taking all his friends on a trip to Tahiti, paying off his mortgage, and giving each family member $12,000 per year (maximum gift without tax consequences).

What’s even more amazing is somehow he seems to have been able to keep his normal life and still teaches spinning classes at Gold’s Gym.  Overall I’d say the guy is a pretty smart guy compared to most lottery winners, the only knock on his intelligence is that he played the lottery to start with and he even thought he could win (I know he was right, but that doesn’t make him smart). 

In fact he even had a system where he thought he could increase his chances of beating the odds by playing the most common winning powerball numbers (apparently there are 15 of them).  To me this is complete rubbish, it’s just like the day traders saying they can predict which direction a stock is going to go based on technical charts.  Yeah you can come up with a pattern in the numbers, but it’s just that a pattern.  It says nothing about what is going to happen in the future, just a random coincidence of what happened in the past.  I think Brad himself knows this is complete bull crap too otherwise he should be investing his millions in lottery tickets and not municipal bonds, oil, gas, and real estate.

In other related news the same year Brad Duke won the lottery 67 people were struck dead by lightening in the U.S. (note: 9 out 10 people struck my lightening live)