The Game You Can Play: Why a Dollar Buys Hope in America, While Options Buy Dreams in India
Why people in America buy lottery tickers and People India play F&O
Imagine you have five dollars in your pocket. Your refrigerator is empty. You haven’t eaten a proper meal in two days. What do you do with that money?
If you’re in America, you might buy a lottery ticket. If you’re in India, you might open a trading app and buy an option contract. Both choices make zero financial sense. Both are mathematically terrible decisions. Yet millions of people make them every single day.
Here’s the strange truth: it’s not about the money. It’s about the game they can finally afford to play.
The Numbers Don’t Lie—But People Keep Playing Anyway
Let’s start with the cold, hard facts that should make anyone run in the opposite direction.
In America, people spent $103 billion on lottery tickets in 2023. That’s more than Americans spent on movies, music, books, and sporting events combined. The poorest Americans—those earning less than $30,000 a year—spend an average of $412 annually on tickets. Some in the poorest zip codes spend nearly 5% of their entire income, or about $600 a year, chasing jackpots. Meanwhile, wealthy Americans in the top income brackets spend only $150 a year, representing just 0.15% of their income.
The return? A pitiful 53 cents for every dollar spent. You’re literally throwing away half your money every time you buy a ticket. The odds of winning a Powerball jackpot are 1 in 292.2 million. You’re more likely to be struck by lightning than to win.
In India, the story is eerily similar but with a modern twist. Instead of lottery tickets, it’s Futures & Options (F&O) trading. In the fiscal year 2025, individual retail traders lost a staggering ₹1.06 lakh crore (about $12.7 billion). That’s a 41% jump from the previous year’s losses of ₹74,812 crore.
Here’s the kicker: 91% of all retail F&O traders lost money. Nine out of ten people. The average trader lost ₹1.1 lakh ($1,320) in a single year. Over four years, retail investors have collectively lost ₹2.87 lakh crore.
Despite these horrifying numbers, participation keeps growing. About 9.6 million unique traders were active in FY25. Young people are flooding in—the proportion of traders under 30 jumped from 31% in FY23 to 43% in FY24.
Why Would Anyone Play a Game They’re Guaranteed to Lose?
This is where it gets interesting. If you ask an economist, they’ll scratch their heads. Traditional economics assumes people are rational actors who maximize their utility. But that’s not how humans work when they’re struggling.
The Psychology of Feeling Poor
A brilliant study from Carnegie Mellon University discovered something fascinating. Researchers took low-income participants and divided them into two groups. One group was asked to report their income on a scale starting at “less than $100,000” and going up from there—making almost everyone feel broke. The other group used a scale starting at “less than $10,000”—making most people feel middle-class.
The results? The group made to feel subjectively poor bought nearly twice as many lottery tickets.
“Some poor people see playing the lottery as their best opportunity for improving their financial situations, albeit wrongly so,” explained Emily Haisley, the study’s lead author. “The hope of getting out of poverty encourages people to continue to buy tickets, even though their chances of stumbling upon a life-changing windfall are nearly impossibly slim”.
The same psychology drives F&O trading in India. One trader named Abhimanyu explained: “What attracted me towards it was an aim to keep 10% of my investments rolling in short-term trades to compound my returns faster”. A scriptwriter in Hyderabad borrowed money from friends and family to trade. A cab driver in Thane said his trading habit started affecting his work.
The Only Level Playing Field They’ll Ever See
Here’s the heartbreaking part: both lotteries and F&O trading feel like the only fair chance poor people ever get.
In that same Carnegie Mellon study, researchers found that when low-income participants were asked to think about advantages that rich or poor people receive in life, they bought more lottery tickets afterward. Why? Because thinking about inequality made them realize that the lottery is one of the few places where a poor person has the exact same odds as a billionaire.
“They are likely to perceive the lottery as a rare opportunity to compete on equal footing with people who are more affluent,” the researchers concluded.
A trader in India named Murali Vijay, who lost ₹1 crore over 13 years, described similar feelings. Despite the losses, the possibility kept him hooked. “I couldn’t wait for the break to be over and for the markets to open Monday,” he said.
It’s Not Stupidity—It’s Hope Dressed as Mathematics
Let’s be clear: people aren’t stupid. They know the odds are terrible. Multiple studies show that low-income lottery players aren’t fooled by “cognitive errors” or lack of education. They understand they’re unlikely to win.
So what’s really happening?
1. They’re Buying Hope, Not Tickets
For someone earning $12,000 a year, saving isn’t going to change their life. Even if they save every penny from not buying lottery tickets ($412/year), it would take decades to accumulate meaningful wealth. But one lottery ticket? That offers a psychological escape hatch—15 seconds of imagining a different life.
In India, F&O trading offers the same dream on steroids. Unlike lottery tickets that take days to reveal results, options trading gives you that dopamine hit in real-time. “Even a 2–3% move in the right direction can multiply your money many times over,” traders are told. The dream feels closer, more achievable.
2. The Illusion of Control
Lottery players often pick their own “lucky” numbers instead of using random picks. It’s irrational—the odds are identical—but it gives them a sense of agency.
F&O traders experience this on a much deeper level. They analyze charts, follow market gurus, develop “strategies.” It feels like skill, even though 91% of them lose. “I have all the wisdom, but I am not able to turn my eyes away from the computer screen,” confessed one trader who lost ₹60 lakh.
Studies confirm that F&O trading triggers the same brain patterns as gambling addiction. The difference? Society doesn’t call it gambling—it calls it “investing.”
3. Government-Approved Dreams
Both systems have something powerful in common: government endorsement.
In America, state lotteries are marketed as supporting education and public services. The implicit message: “You’re being a good citizen by playing.” States collected $30.4 billion in lottery revenue in 2021.
In India, the markets are regulated by SEBI, traded on official exchanges like NSE. This gives F&O a veneer of legitimacy that a betting app lacks. India now accounts for 60% of global equity derivatives trading. The government benefits from transaction taxes and brokerage revenues.
The cruelest irony? Both systems extract the most money from those who can least afford to lose it, then use that money to fund services that theoretically benefit society.
The Addiction That Doesn’t Look Like Addiction
Perhaps the most disturbing parallel is how both lotteries and F&O trading create addiction-like behavior.
In lottery players: Research shows that winning even a small jackpot in your neighborhood increases lottery consumption for months afterward. About half of the increased spending persists after six months; 40% remains after 18 months.
In F&O traders: The pattern is even more severe. Despite consistent losses, 75% of loss-making traders continued trading year after year. Dr. Jayant Mahadevan, a psychiatrist at India’s National Institute of Mental Health, says: “Starting 2019, we have seen a subset of people who come in complaining about their excessive stock trading in a way that mimics gambling”.
One trader described experiencing withdrawal symptoms on weekends: “I would pick up fights with my wife for no reason. I couldn’t wait for the break to be over and for the markets to open Monday”.
The technology makes it worse. Trading apps send constant notifications, price alerts, and flashing profit-and-loss numbers that keep the brain on high alert. It’s “engineered to keep you engaged”—just like lottery advertising that shows winners celebrating while hiding the millions of losers.
Two Countries, One Human Truth
Here’s what the lottery in America and F&O in India teach us about human nature:
Financial logic doesn’t matter when you have nothing to lose. If your current path guarantees you’ll stay poor, even a 1-in-292-million shot starts to look reasonable. It’s not that poor people are bad at math—it’s that they’re operating with a different equation. The question isn’t “What’s the expected value?” It’s “What’s my only possible escape route?”
Hope is worth paying for, even when it’s false. That $5 lottery ticket or ₹2,000 options contract isn’t really about winning millions. It’s about purchasing a week of daydreams. It’s about telling yourself that your situation isn’t permanent, that fate could change everything tomorrow.
Systems designed to “help” often harm the most vulnerable. Government lotteries promise to fund education while extracting billions from people who never got a decent education themselves. F&O markets promise “financial inclusion” while systematically transferring wealth from retail traders to institutional players.
The Uncomfortable Question
Both lotteries and F&O trading force us to confront an uncomfortable truth about modern economies: When legitimate paths to prosperity are blocked, people will pay for the illusion of a chance.
One in five Americans believe the lottery is their only way to accumulate significant savings. In India, young people are mortgaging their parents’ homes to fund their F&O trading.
These aren’t isolated bad decisions. They’re rational responses to irrational circumstances. They’re what happens when the game of life feels so rigged that people would rather play a game they know is rigged but where everyone starts equal—even if only for a moment.
As behavioral economist George Loewenstein put it: “The propensity of low income individuals to play the lottery has the perverse effect of exacerbating the very poverty that purchasers are hoping to escape”.
The same holds true for India’s F&O traders. They’re not investing—they’re dreaming. And dreams, as it turns out, are expensive.
But when reality offers no hope, some people will gladly pay $5, or ₹2,000, for 15 seconds—or 15 minutes—of imagining that tomorrow might be different.
That’s not stupidity. That’s heartbreaking rationality.