Fri 7 Aug 2009
You have $20 (that will be recognized where/whenever you go) and a time machine. How do you maximize your profits for your return to 2009?
Posted by starman6 answers so far!
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Big Big Question is a Josh Millard project.
1604: I bribe a typesetter in James Roberts’ printing house to let me have the manuscript for Hamlet when he’s done with it.
Man, anybody who takes $20 into the past is a sucker. I’d go into the future and buy a newspaper.
what would I expect to hear when I asked how much the newspaper cost? “Twenty Bucks, same as in town.”
The restriction that you have to “maximize your profits for your return to 2009″ requires (I think) you go into the past. The small amount of money also makes the question more interesting as it really requires you to find a discrete event, unless you want to go really far back and start betting on every World Series you can remember the outcome of, but you’d be too old to enjoy your 2009 wealth at that point.
My off the cuff answer is: to 1994 or so, where I buy Sergei Brin lunch and tell him about this great idea I have.
Since I suck at investing, I dunno. Maybe buy some stock in a company that’s like Google but launched at a much cheaper share price.
I tweeted Cortex and told him to push this to the front page.
Yeah, I’d say invest in Microsoft or Google.. or find a way to invest with Rockefeller. I don’t think just putting it in the bank would be enough. Anyone good with compound interest?
Well, it depends, really. When was compound interest invented? Even if you went back 500 years, and managed to get 3% more than inflation, you’d have 64M dollars. You might be better off getting a mint first edition copy of hamlet. Or maybe artifacts from ancient rome or greece?