Is there a way to take advantage of nice numbers?
You'd need millions of dollars to trade the number of shares it would take to profit from these penny variations.  What you bring up here is the way high frequency firms front-run trades and profit on these pennies. Say you have a trade commission of $5.  Every time you buy you pay $5, every time you sell you pay $5.  So you need a gain in excess of $10, a 10% gain on $100.  Now if you wanted to trade on a penny movement from $100 to $100.01, you need to have bought 1,000 shares totaling $100,000 for the $0.01 price movement to cover your commission costs.  If you had $1,000,000 to put at risk, that $0.01 price movement would net you $90 after commission, $10,000,000 would have made you $990.  You need much larger gains at the retail level because commissions will equate to a significant percentage of the money you're investing. Very large trading entities have much different arrangements and costs with the exchanges.  They might not pay a fee on each transaction but something that more closely resembles a subscription fee, and costs something that more closely resembles a house. Now to your point, catching these price movements and profiting.  The way high frequency trading firms purportedly make money relates to having a very low latency network connection to a particular exchange.  Their very low latency/very fast network connection lets them see orders and transact orders before other parties.   Say some stock has an ask at $101 x 1,000 shares.  The next depth is $101.10.  You see a market buy order come in for 1,000 shares and place a buy order for 1,000 shares at $101 which hits the exchange first, then immediately place a sell order at $101.09, changing the ask from $101.00 to $101.09 and selling in to the market order for a gain of $0.09 per share.
I'll mirror what the others have said in that your expectations for returns are wildly out of line with reality. If you could achieve that with only moderate risk hopefully you can see that you could ladder those returns by re-investing them and become a billionaire in short order. You may have noticed that there are a lot of really financially savvy people who are not billionaires. So the math for your plan falls apart somewhere, obviously. However, in the spirit of being helpful, and with the caveat that super high returns involve super high risk I'll try and point you in the direction where this is theoretically possible, even if the odds would be better buying lottery tickets. One way to get more leverage from your money than just buying stocks is to buy options. With an options strategy your return/loss will be magnified greatly compared to buying stocks. That is, you can lose or gain a much higher multiplier of your original investment. That said, I don't advise doing that with any money that you can't afford to lose every penny of, because you likely will. Even with a good investment strategy, you cannot expect more than 8-10% per year in average. Reducing this by a 3% inflation ratio leaves you with 5 - 7%, which means 15k$ - 21k$. Consider seriously if you could live from that amount as annual income, longterm. If you think so, there is a second hurdle - the words in average. A good year could increase your capital a bit, but a bad year can devastate it, and you would not have the time to wait for the good years to average it out. For example, if your second year gives you a 10% loss, and you still draw 15k$ (and inflation eats another 3%), you have only 247k$ left effectively, and future years will have to go with 12k$ - 17k$. Imagine a second bad year. As a consequence, you either need to be prepared to go back to work in that situation (tough after being without job for years), or you can live on less to begin with: if you can make it on 10k$ to begin with (and do, even in good years), you have a pretty good chance to get through your life with it. Note that 'make it with x' always includes taxes, health care, etc. - nothing is free. I think it's possible, as people live on 10k$ a year. But you need to be sure you can trust yourself to stay within the limit and not give in and spent more - not easy for many people. Yes, one such strategy is dividend arbitrage using stock and in the money options. You have to find out which option is the most mispriced before the ex-dividend date. So you think there is a business that can take $X and in two weeks turn it into $10X plus their profit.  That means that in two weeks you can turn $1,000 into $10,000. So every two weeks you add a zero, in six weeks you add 3 zeros. In 12 weeks total your $1,000 is now $1,000,000,000; and in a few weeks after that you are richer than Bill Gates. All Guaranteed! Run away. "Forget the math's specifics for a moment: here's some principles. Additional housing for a renter gives you returns in the form of money. Additional housing for yourself pays its returns in the form of ""here is a nice house, live in it"". Which do you need more of?  If you don't need the money, get a nicer house for yourself. If you need (or want) the money, get a modest house for yourself and either use the other house as a rental property, or invest the proceeds of its sale in the stock market. But under normal circumstances (++) don't expect that buying more house for yourself is a good way to increase how much money you have. It's not. (++ the exception being during situations where land/housing value rises quickly, and when that rise is not part of a housing bubble which later collapses. Generally long-term housing values tend to be relatively stable; the real returns are from the rent, or what economists call imputed rent when you're occupying it yourself.)" It should be very obvious that getting X Euro cash in your hand is better than deducting them from taxable income. You would need to have a tax rate of over 100% to do better otherwise. "As others have alluded to but haven't said due to the lack of reputation points to spare, you can take advantage of oil prices by leveraging up and using as much credit and margin as the banks and brokerages (respectively) will lend you. People assume that the correct answer on this forum has to masquerade as conservative financial advice, and this is not advice nor conservative. Futures contracts are readily available, but they are expensive to obtain (like a minimum entry of $4,450). But if this expense is no such object to you then you can then obtain this contract which is actually worth 20x that and experience the price appreciation and depreciation of the whole contract. The concept is similar to a downpayment on a mortgage. You assume ""rock bottom"" oil prices, but fortunately for you, futures contracts will allow you to quickly change your bets from future price appreciation and allow you to speculate on future price depreciation. So although the union workers will be protesting full time after the drilling company lays them off, you will still be getting wealthier. Long Options. These are the best. The difference with options, amongst other speculation products, is that options require the least amount of capital risk for the greatest reward. With futures, or with trading shares of an ETF (especially on margin), you have to put up a lot of capital, and if the market does not go your desired direction, then will lose a lot. And on margin products you can lose more than you put in. Being long options does not come with these dilemmas. A long march 2015 call option on USO ETF can currently be bought for less than $200 of actual cash (ie. the trading quote will be less than $2.00, but this will cost you less than $200), and will be worth $1000 on a very modest rebound in prices. The most you can lose is the $200 for the contract. Compared to $4450 on the futures, or $100,000 (that you don't have) in the futures market if oil really moves against you, or compared to whatever large amount of cash needed to actually buy shares of an ETF needed to make any decent return. These are the most lucrative (and fun and exhilarating and ) ways to take advantage of rock bottom oil prices, as an individual." The 20x number is drawn directly from the assumption that it should be easy to get more than 4% average return on investment. After lots of historical studies,  Monte Carlo simulations, and the like there was a consensus that saving more didn't significantly increase the odds of achieving at least the desired yearly income sustainably. (That's the same calculations the insurance firms use as the starting point for writing annuities.) There are also some assumptions about inflation and its interaction with the market built into this rule-of-thumb. Note that this is 20x what you want as post-retirement income, not necessarily 20x your current income. I have a moderately frugal lifestyle, And my budget confirms that my actual spending -- even in years when I allow myself a splurge -- is well below my current income, with the excess going into the investments. To sustain my lifestyle, I need that lower number plus any taxes that'll be due on it plus whatever I want to allocate as average emergency reserve... and theoretically I should be able to base the 20x on that lower number. When I run estimates (Quicken has a tool for this, so does my credit union, I  presume others are widely available), they tend to confirm this. I'm still using the higher number for planning, though. I don't feel any need to retire early (though I have issues with my current manager), and I have no objection at all to being able to afford better toys on occasion. Or to leaving a legacy to friends, relatives, and/or charity. But it's nice to know exactly when I could punt the day job if I wanted to. "The real question is what can you NOT do!  If you track all your monetary actions, you know everything about your monetary situation.  That means you have the tools to ask and answer ""what if"" questions, such as: ""If I get a 10% raise, could I take longer vacations?""  You could calculate how much you spend per day on vacation and then consider the amount of your raise and how much of it you'd need to allocate to vacations to, say, be able to take a two-week vacation instead of a one-week vacation. ""How much more would I have to earn to move to this nicer apartment?""  This may seem like a simple question, but a surprising number of people can't answer it in a reliable way, because they don't have a clear understanding of how much money they make and how much of it they can afford to spend on housing.  If you find you have lots of spare income, maybe you can move to the nicer place right away; if not, at least you can get a sense of how much more money you'd need to make it happen. ""If I started taking the bus to work, how much would I save?""  You can look at how much you spend on gas and compare that to the price of a bus pass.  By separating out categories like gas, repairs, and car insurance, you can also calculate different scenarios, like if you still kept your car but only used it for occasional trips, versus if you sold the car and used only public transportation. ""If I want to take a trip to Tahiti, what can I cut back on to save the money?""  Using your table you can pencil out scenarios like ""Suppose I stop eating out for lunch at work and just bring my lunch, how long would I have to do that to save enough to pay for a plane ticket?"" These are just a few random examples.  The general idea is that with a record of hard numbers, you can start to consider potential tradeoffs in an objective way --- that is, you can ask ""how much in category X would I have to give up to gain this thing I want in category Y?"" The real trick in making use of your data is not so much ""what"" you can do, but ""how"" exactly to do it.  You may have to become more of a spreadsheet wizard to really delve into these questions.  Also, if you have programming expertise, you can even use something like Python to do calculations that might be laborious in a spreadsheet." In the case you propose, a taxable windfall, your best hope is to marry someone who has his/her own loss of about the same amount. This advice would work if your gain is a 10 bagger, as you suggest, but not for a lottery. In the dot com bubble, I heard of more than one couple that got married under these conditions. As far as other gains, it would be tough to contrive a situation that would give you such a tax offset without taking on a huge risk, far greater that the $133K in tax you might save. Yes. it is possible, I have seen many times banks permitting overdrawing and later charging a high courtesy fees. Of course in many countries this is not permitted. In one of my account, I am running negative balance as the bank has charged its commission which is not due. What could a small guy with $100 do to make himself not poor To answer the question directly, not much. Short of investing in something at the exact moment before it goes bananas, then reinvesting into a bigger stock and bigger etc, it's super high risk. A better way is to sacrifice some small things, less coffee, less smokes, less going out partying so that instead of having $100, you have $100 a week. This puts you into a situation where you can save enough to become a deposit on an appreciating asset (choose your own asset class, property in AU for me). Take out a loan for as much as you can for your $100 a week payment and make it interest only with an offset against it, distributions from shares can either be reinvested or put into the offset or in the case of property, rent can be put against the offset, pretty soon you end up with a scenario where you have cash offsetting a loan down to nothing but you still have access to the cash, invest into another place and revalue your asset, you can take out any equity that has grown and put that also into your offset. Keep pulling equity and using the money from the offset as deposits on other assets (it kind of works really well on property) and within 15 years you can build an empire with a passive income to retire on. The biggest thing the rich guys get that the poor guys don't is that debt is GOOD, use someone else's money to buy an appreciating asset then when you pay it back eventually, you own the growth. Use debt to buy more debt for exponential growth. Of course, you need to also invest your time to research what you are investing in, you need to know when you make the decision to buy that it will appreciate, it's no good just buying off a tip, you may as well drop your money on the horses if you want to play it like that. Fortunately, one thing we all have in common regardless of our money is time, we have time which we can invest. Your plan won't work. Working 40 hours a week at federal minimum wage (currently $7.25 / hr) for 52 weeks is an annual income of just over $15,000. Even assuming you can reliably get a return of 15% (which you definitely can't), you'd need to start with $100,000 of assets to earn this poverty income. Assuming a more reasonable 7% bumps the required assets up to over $200,000, and even then you're dead the first time you need to make withdrawals after a mistake or after a major market downturn. As a fellow math Ph.D. student, I know your pain. I, too, struggled for a while with boredom in an earlier career, but it's possible to make it work. I think the secret is to find a job that's engaging enough that your mind can't wander too much at work, and set aside some hobby time to work on interesting projects. You likely have some marketable skills that can work for you outside of academia, if you look for them, to allow you to find an interesting job. I think there's not much you can do besides trying not to get fired from your next McJob until you can find something more interesting. There's no magic money-for-nothing in the stock market. Simple: Do a stock split. Each 1 Ordinary share now = 100 Ordinary shares (or 100,000 or whatever you choose). Then sell 20 (or 20,000) of them to your third party. (Stock splits are fairly routine occurrence. Apple for example has done several, most recently in 2014 when 1 share = 7 shares). Alternatively you could go the route of creating a new share class with different rights, preferences etc. But this is more complicated. Very Interesting Math. Plain and Simple, it saves you $10.00. When 18% goes above $10 you loose the money, you save if it is (18% of the baae bill) is less than $10. This raises few questions: You are forced to give out 18% tips. You may wish to keep it at 10-15%. You have no choice. All thing considered, better to avoid such coupons. They force you to spend money, they force you to spend in a particular way and they force you to give a tip, you may not be inclined to.