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Matt Levine

It's OK to Get Distracted by Mega Millions

You don’t need to pay attention to stocks today. No one else will either.

Betting on a 0.0000003 percent chance. — Betting on a 0.0000003 percent chance.
Photographer: ANGELA WEISS/AFP

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October 22, 2018, 6:17 PM UTC

This post originally appeared in Money Stuff.

The next Mega Millions jackpot will be a record $1.6 billion, which means there is an approximately 0.0000003 percent chance that tomorrow will be the last Money Stuff, bye. Besides the obvious trade here—buy Mega Millions tickets—you might bet on increasing correlation in the stock market. Here (via Paul Kedrosky) is “Attention allocation and return co-movement: Evidence from repeated natural experiments,” by Shiyang Huang, Yulin Huang and Tse-Chun Lin of the University of Hong Kong: