đź’¸ Will the Lottery Survive Polymarket?

Polymarket is Changing the Appeal of Powerball — Plus, Fresh Tariff Threats (That Were Later Walked Back) Jolt the Markets

Author

Katie Perry
October 14, 2025

Welcome to Tuesday Thursday Saturday! Here, I share a snapshot of trending stories across business, tech, and culture, plus some updates from the daily financial news show I host. - KP

The Big Story: A $100B Habit Meets a New Speculative Culture

With jackpots regularly crossing the billion-dollar mark, the lottery remains one of America’s most enduring habits: a $100 billion pastime built on improbable odds. 

The chances of hitting a jackpot are microscopic: roughly 1 in 292 million for Powerball and 1 in 302 million for Mega Millions. Still, Americans spend over a hundred billion dollars a year on tickets, making it the nation’s most popular form of gambling.

At a time when the world’s wealthiest people are approaching trillionaire status, it’s hard to size up $100 billion, so let’s put this into context. It’s over 10X the size of the entire U.S. movie box office in 2024 (estimated at $8.6B), nearly double what Americans spend on video games (about $60B), and about two-thirds of what we spend on our pets ($152B in 2024). In other words, the lottery outpaces many entertainment categories we talk about far more often. 

The odds are bad, but never zero.

Who’s Playing, Anyway? 

Most U.S. adults don’t buy tickets weekly. Instead, participation spikes around record jackpots. But among those who do play, the spending adds up. Outside the five non-lottery states, the average U.S. adult spends north of $300 on tickets. In fairness, this is a per-capita figure that masks heavy concentration among frequent players. In many systems, the top 10% of players drive ~40% of sales, with some reporting spend near $200/week.

Where all that money goes depends on the state, but according to the NASPL, roughly 60% of lottery revenue returns to players as prizes, about 30% funds public programs like education, infrastructure, or veteran services, and the remaining 10% covers administrative and retailer costs.

Lotteries: a force for good? Not so fast, say the skeptics (and Lee Corso). The demographic story here is uncomfortable but important. An investigation by the University of Maryland’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism found lottery retailers are disproportionately clustered in lower-income neighborhoods, with similar patterns in many Black and Hispanic communities. The conclusion: lottery spending functions as a wealth transfer away from those communities.

Zooming in on spending burden, The Economist analyzed payments data and found adults in the poorest 1% of ZIP codes spend about $600/year, or nearly 5% of income, on lotto tickets, versus roughly $150/year (or 0.15% of income) in the richest 1%. That’s a 30X difference as a share of income.

The Culture Shift: Investing vs. Gambling vs. Entertainment

So here’s the current state of affairs: On one hand, we have the lottery — and on the other we have … multi-leg parlays.

It’s tempting to blame platforms like Robinhood, Coinbase, and, more recently, Polymarket and Kalshi, for gamifying finance. But the deeper reality is that investing and trading have become a hobby for millions. It is a wealth-building strategy and a form of entertainment all at once.

You can blame UX decisions (remember “confetti-gate?”) all you want, or the increased access to riskier “bets,” whether those be micro-cap stocks or sports bets -- however, it’s worth considering if these popular tools made us more speculative, or if they simply evolved to meet the demand of our natural human tendencies. I previously wrote about our country’s obsession with speculation, and newsflash: it did NOT start with “DraftKings” becoming a household name.

Robinhood has a prediction markets product embedded in its vast ecosystem of financial products, ranging from low-risk ETFs to altcoins and, soon, basically anything you can tokenize. Stocktwits, which produces my morning markets show, just announced a formal partnership with Polymarket. These worlds are all colliding because that’s simply the present messiness of our relationship with money, risk, and financial security. We all have a lot of apps on our phones that could earn (or lose) us money. And we’re using them concurrently.

So let’s go back to the lottery, because things like sports betting and prediction markets tend to get bucketed into a similar category. What’s the difference? And how come the lottery has endured alongside all of these other ways to be speculative? 

All three monetize uncertainty, but the ethical frame is somewhat different across them:

  • Information vs. randomness. Prediction markets and sportsbooks let people update beliefs and hedge, whereas lotteries are pure chance. That distinction matters for agency and education, but it also risks rebranding gambling as “analysis,” which can downplay harm.

  • Expected value and transparency. Lotteries publish fixed odds; sportsbooks and prediction markets publish dynamic prices/lines that imply probabilities. The perceived “fairness” rises when users can see and respond to information, though that can also fuel overconfidence. 

  • Who’s bearing the burden? The clustering of lottery retailers in lower-income neighborhoods raises hard questions about regressivity and targeted marketing, even when some lottery funds go to public goods. Sportsbooks skew online and mobile; harms there show up as loss chasing and parlay promotion that exploits cognitive biases, especially among young bettors.

Basically, the lottery has always lived in this gray zone of sanctioned risk, public good, and private loss. The question now is whether that uneasy balance can survive in a world overflowing with other, perhaps even more engaging, ways to take a chance.

So, Will the Lottery Survive?

Early signals say yes, for now — even if we’re seeing some fragmentation when it comes to the way younger Americans play. One industry survey notes 35% of 18-34-year-olds have never bought a Powerball ticket, despite recent $2 billion payouts. (In the past year, sports betting among that group is 37%, within 3 points of their Mega Millions play rate.)

Young adults also report higher monthly online gambling and sports-betting spend than they do on draw games. That’s not a full exodus from the lottery, though. Scratch-offs, for example, still see weekly action across all demos — but there is a shift in attention and wallet share, for sure.

Other reporting points in the same direction: younger adults spend less on tickets than older cohorts and are less likely to buy at all, even as total lottery sales rise on the back of older, frequent players. Think of it as coexistence with drift: the dollars are not vanishing; they’re splitting across formats that feel more interactive.

I keep getting ads for mobile lottery apps lately, which makes me think that the most likely near-term future is closer to convergence than it is to cannibalization. Lotteries are accelerating digital sales and app experiences at the same time sportsbooks and prediction markets (event-based betting) platforms are pitching small-stake, big-moment products to the same casual speculators. 

Worth noting: the lottery has survived moral panics and reform cycles for centuries because it delivers something simple: a cheap ticket to a big, impossible dream. America’s speculative culture isn’t new; it’s just networked now. The question isn’t whether lotteries “lose” to sports betting and prediction markets, but how all of these products compete for the same minutes, the same dollars, and the same hopes.

If trading is increasingly a hobby, prediction markets are a vice, and lotteries are a national pastime, then the real story is how we choose to navigate the trade-offs: who pays, who benefits, and what we call it when all the ways we “bet” look like entertainment.

Sidebar: Interestingly, five U.S. states do not have formal lotteries: Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, and Utah. Utah has a constitutional ban shaped by religious opposition; Nevada’s powerful casino industry has long resisted a competitor; Alaska and Hawaii cite cultural and economic concerns; and Alabama also faces constitutional and political resistance. 

Daily Rip Live: Holy Crap 400K of You Saw at Least Some of Yesterday’s Show?!?!

People are confused.

Every weekday, Shay Boloor and I co-host a morning markets show for Stocktwits called The Daily Rip Live. Shay is out for a couple weeks, so we have a bunch of guests coming in to fill the void. On Monday’s show, we welcomed back one of my favorite traders, Olivia “Voz” Voznenko.

On X, we racked up more than 400,000 streams. It was definitely our biggest show to date! This is exciting, fun, and mildly horrifying, but it does make me excited to continue to build out the show as we expand our audience.

Here’s what we covered:

⇢ 0:45 | Why are men slapping each other in the NFL?

⇢ 2:21 | Friday play-by-play: 11 AM tariff tweet from El Jefe sends markets into a tailspin, but by Sunday, we were told everything was “fine” 🌮

⇢ 10:40 | Crypto patterns are suggesting more volatility ahead; plus, WTH happened with last Friday’s enormous crypto liquidation — $18B wiped! One word: leverage.

⇢ 18:15 | Why everyone’s talking about rare earths, also what actually is a “rare earth mineral”; plus Voz’s rare earth setups: $USAR ( ▼ 15.26% ) & $AREC ( ▼ 4.0% ) | CLIP

⇢ 24:45 | $JPM ( ▼ 2.34% ) piles into Team America trade — the new “Made in America” is investing in businesses and sectors that position us for long-term strength.

⇢ 27:00 More Voz setups: $BE ( ▼ 4.06% ) trending, $STI ( ▼ 10.93% ) on watch

⇢ 40:00 | $BAC ( â–˛ 0.16% ) sets gold target: $5K by 2026? Meanwhile, silver is partying like it’s 2011, says Voz $SLV ( â–Ľ 2.32% ) (We are not partying like it’s 2011, though, because that was a wild time we do not want to revisit anytime soon.)

⇢ 49:45 | The other Katy Perry is dating Justin Trudeau, and the Internet is confused. I am going to have to use my full legal name for this book, aren’t I?

Now, Here’s a Chart

[Extremely Cardi B voice] That’s suspicious! Per Wall Street Journal reporting:

“President Trump’s surprise announcement of 100% tariffs against China on Friday triggered a cryptocurrency selloff that wiped out more than $19 billion in leveraged positions. Two accounts that placed bets against the market minutes before the news broke scored a $160 million windfall.”

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Tuesday Thursday Saturday is written by Katie Perry, owner of Ursa Major Media, which provides fractional marketing services and strategy in software, tech, consumer products, professional services, and other industries. She is also the co-host of Stocktwits’ Daily Rip Live show.

Disclaimer: The contents here reflect recaps and summaries of pre-reported or published data, news, and trends. I have cited sources and context for the information provided to the best of my ability. The purpose of the newsletter is to inform and educate on larger trends shaping business and culture — this is NOT investment advice. As an investor, you should always do your own research before making any decisions about your money or your portfolio.