Suppose that I have some budget set aside for philanthropic funding, say $1,000, but I think there are a big returns to scale, so that it would be >1,000x better if I had $1,000,000.[1]
What are my best options for some bets I can make to get some chance of turning that $1,000 into $1,000,000?
I imagine the bets are generally better the more positive their EV is (which in practice means the less negative the EV is), the easier they are to find (like if they’re standardised), and the better their tax treatment is, especially if you repeat them multiple times (maybe they can be done by DAFs).
- ^
NB: I don’t believe this
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/donor-lottery
Yeah, I’m looking for how one would roll one’s own donor lottery out of non-philanthropic funds
Note that GWWC is shutting down their donor lottery, among other things: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/f7yQFP3ZhtfDkD7pr/gwwc-is-retiring-10-initiatives
Given that you’re not satisfied with the Donor Lottery and want to gamble against “non-philanthropic funds,” then you probably want to pool your money with all other gambling philanthropists before making a single large bet.
A single large bet prevents your winnings from averaging out against other philanthropists’ losings (resulting in a worst outcome than just using the Donor Lottery).
If there are many gambling philanthropists, you can’t go to the casino, because they probably don’t have enough money to multiply all your funds by 1000x. You have to make some kind of extreme bet on the stock market.
If you want to ensure that you win the bet in at least one branch of the multiverse (haha), then you might roll a quantum dice and let it decide which stock you bet on (or against).
Two options I came up with:
European Roulette has a house edge of 2.7%. I think in the UK, gambling winnings don’t get taxed. I think in the US, you wouldn’t tax each win, but just your total winnings.
I’m seeing bid-ask spreads of about 10% on SPX call options. Naïvely, perhaps that means the “edge” is about 5% for someone looking to gamble. I think that the implied edge is much worse for further out-of-the-money options, but if you chain in-the-money options you’d have to pay tax on each win (assuming you won).
If you go the casino route, craps is slightly better. Don’t pass is 1.40% house edge, and they let you take (or lay, for don’t pass) “free odds” on a point, which is 0% (pays true odds of winning), getting it down below a percent. Taxes may not matter if you can deduct the full charitable contribution.
Note that if you had a perfect 50% even-money bet, you’d have to win 10 times to turn your $1000 into $1.024M. 0.5 ^ 10 = 0.000977, so you’ve got almost a tenth of a percent of winning.
I think occassionally some lotteries are positive or neutral-ish EV, when the jackpots are really big (like >$1billion)? Not sure. You have to check the taxes and the payment schedules etc.
Hard to buy tickets at large scale often I think.
I mean, if there were ANY widely-available, repeatable, +ev bets, they’d pretty quickly get dried up by just a few players who can spell “Kelly”.
There are LOTS of negative EV bets available, if you think the distribution of 0.005% chance of $1000000 and 99.995% of $0 is better than a straight $1000.
Yes, I expect they will mostly be negative EV. I’m interested in those