This could explain their spectacular performance as investors…in the case of Buffet, his returns have exceeded anyone else’s by a wide margin!
Or, they could also be gifted with “precognition”-the ability to see the future beofre events happen.
Don’t laugh…the son of the great aircraft designer (Igor Sikorsky) reported that his father had many precognitive visions…once in 1925, he saw in completed detail, an aircraft that he (Sikorsky) didn’t design until 1943!
Of course the whole possibility of these things (precognition, time travel) means that history must constantly be changing…if someone goes back and influences the past, the present must change to reflect it!
Maybe this is why there are so many crazy people today? :eek:
Hey!!
Maybe you can get together with this guy!!
:eek: 
[Evil]
What about medicine? Are there any cheap medications available now that can cure ailments that were fatal or debilitating in 1954? Searching records to find people who died of it ought to be possible. Human life can be very valuable, if the human is sufficiently wealthy.
[/Evil]
Ah, but that might be the very reason for the price drop in transistors. Someone from 2150 may have already gone back in time with transistors to make some money.
Me? The past is dead, forget it. Skip ahead 20 years and memorize the results of as many sporting events as you can. 20 years of correct Super Bowl bets at 25 to 100-1 should tide you over nicely.
But you’d have to bring back 1951-style transistors. Which would be pretty darn expensive to replicate, I’d imagine, since one of the main reasons why transistors got so cheap is because we managed to miniturize them so much, so there’s less raw material involved.
-lv
Forget the 1951-style transistors.
Head back to the 1920’s. You’ll know what to get…
Since time paradoxes are potentially dangerous, you should try to avoid them.
Avoid bringing unique material objects permanently across time. Information is much safer to transport.
Bryan Ekers has the right idea with cashing out before your time travel trip. You’ve pretty much ensured your success. But what if you don’t find that buried box?
Also, I would be far more ambitious… a one-time journey such as this should net at least $100 million and should be well planned to maximize the chance of success.
First, I would convert the money into 1950’s coins as suggested earlier in the thread. Then, bet a few horse races so I had at least $25,000.
I would locate Warren Buffet and befriend him. During our conversations, I would mention some sound investment strategies and offer to purchase a stake in his investment partnership. We would have legal contracts drawn up and signed by both parties. If possible, take this contract with you on the return journey, or bury it in a safe location that you know is undisturbed today.
Fast forward to today… look up your pal Warren Buffet and cash out your stake. As you can see, it has already worked: http://www.salon.com/people/bc/1999/08/31/buffett/
Then don’t put the box there in 1954. Only put the box in a place where you know it can be found in 2004. Of course the only way to know that you can find it in 2004 is to actually find it in 2004, so try searching a few likely places that look largely undisturbed for the last 50 years. As soon as you find the box, make a note of the location and revisit it in 1954 to drop the box off.
Mind-bending, ain’t it?
Yep, it sure is.
Of course, the first thing you want to do is look around in some likely places where you can find the time machine you planted for your past self.
How else are you going to get yourself a time machine? Use the time machine to give yourself one, of course!
What I don’t understand is why my future self has waited so long to give me my damn time machine. I would have given it to myself when I was 25 and young enough to enjoy it. You hear me, me? I want my time machine NOW dammit!
I’ll check under the sofa tonight…I always drop things there…
We’re all going to be rich. We have a wealth of good ideas here. We’ve pretty much cracked it. Yay us!
Now all we need is a time mach…
Damn. Bugger. Hell.
Forgot about that. For a moment there I thought we had it made.
I think you are allowing multiple trips here. Take your $10,000 back to 1954 and stuff your time machine with pure, uncut Colombian cocaine. If the time machine is the size of a Mini, you could turn the $10,000 into $3,000,000.
(1 kilo sells for approx. $50,000 in 2004)
And you wouldn’t have all the identity issues you have with stocks, safe deopsit boxes, etc.
Quoth The Controvert:
Quite the contrary: The reason that material objects are dangerous is precisely the fact that they do carry information. In fact, I suspect that it is rigorously true that any time-travel investment method which earned a profit greater than blind market investment over the same time period would require sufficient information transfer to be dangerous, and I would not be at all surprised if any such scheme were to result, directly or indirectly, in the death (possibly the very gruesome death) of the person attempting to use it.
However, for the purposes of the OP’s question, I think it is appropriate to, purely hypothetically, ignore the increase in danger presented directly by the various time-travel paradoces.
I’ve got a question…if we can stretch the parameters of the time jump a bit, could you buy a bunch of Cocaine or Heroin in, say, pre 1914 when they were perfectly legal, and then sell it in 1954? How much did Bayer Heroin™ cost, by weight?
Even if I had the money, I wouldn’t invest in Berkshire Hathaway right now: Buffet’s 74. How much do you think those shares are going to be worth when he dies? Only a little over the breakup value.
It doesn’t matter, because with time travel, you are profiting directly from past performance, not hoping for future gains based on past performance.
As for information vs. permanent objects, it is far easier to discount the ravings of a “lunatic” who is accurately predicting random events than it is to discount the newspaper from next week that is accurately predicting random events.