Technically, they are both estimates. The CV is fixed based on the number of tickets sold, but the number of tickets sold is estimated. And often, they don’t know exactly how many tickets were sold at the time of the drawing. Then the Annuity is estimated based on the estimated CV and the estimated return they will get.
Do they still go out to insurance companies? I thought I read somewhere that they were creating the annuity and investments themselves and maybe hedging or buying insurance on the payouts.
Oh… maybe not? I was the Powerball commissioner at work for a while so I had a better handle on how it all worked then. We bought when the EV exceeded the ticket price, not corrected for the possibility of multiple winners because my model wasn’t that sophisticated.
But I don’t do that any more and I don’t pay as much attention as I used to.
And I guess I should have said the CV is defined, not fixed.
I saw an article claiming that there was no winner and it had rolled to 2.3B. But it usually takes a while (hours) for them to determine whether there are winners or not. The Powerball site is not saying it has rolled yet. But they have been slow updating recently.
One ticket doesn’t mean one winner. I bet a lot of the ticket sales are office pools. I was in a pool where if we won fewer dollars than people we’d “reinvest” the following drawing even if someone won the jackpot. (No new money at that point… just reinvested winnings.)
Still, even a fraction of $20M is probably nothing to sneeze at. If it was an office pool it might not be enough to retire though, depending on the age / number of participants, but it’d get you a LOT closer.
Even if it was, say, 30 people… that’s still $200,000 into your bank account. Like I said, not enough to retire (unless you were already pretty close) but enough to make a material difference.
