I’ll tell you what, you would be sloppy rich. I don’t mean just upgrade-to-a-mansion-and-get-a-fleet-of-new-cars rich. I’m not talking pay-someone-else-to-take-out-your-garbage-and-wash-your-dishes rich. I’m talking private-jet-with-your-initials-on-the-tail rich.  I’m talking personal-thank-you-note-from-the-fine-people-at-the-Internal-Revenue-Service rich.

Way back when, if you shorted these stocks or even were smarter and bought some put option on just one of these losers, chances are you would be reading this right now from a comfortable seat on your own private island. Maybe your own private country.

US Treasury auditors removing toxic assets from Bank Of America

Why play in the casino when you can play the stock for a real win?

These days, Wynn Resorts stock has dropped from over $110 a share to around $60. When I checked how much you could get for your 110 puts, it was around $68 a share. That means you would have turned your $10,000 investment into $6.8 million – a tidy little profit; but check my math since the summer interns have not arrived yet and usually they are the ones who check this kind of stuff. I haven’t had a decent cup of office coffee since last summer either.

There’s one little catch to this brilliant investment strategy…

Did you ever notice how you never really know which stocks will go up or down? To make this work, you need to know the ones about to make really big moves. Looking back at the last year, you could have picked about any stock to short or play with put options and been a big winner.  By big winner, I mean amassed enough money so you would need to use an offshore tax haven like Exxon Mobil (XOM), General Electric (GE), or Wal-Mart (WMT).

The trick to make this work is to know which stocks are going to move the most and get your trade in when those stocks are at their highs or lows.

With all this money and that private jet at stake, you would think someone could solve this knowing which stocks are going to move and when problem….

As a diligent journalist, that’s when I started working my contacts. I called around to a few places like NASA, The National Science Foundation, and Best Buy (BBY) to see if they had any idea on how a person could sort of know ahead of time which stocks were going up or down.

What could the government really be developing in this building?
Could this be the reason the Swine Flu outbreak stopped so quickly?

Could this be an early rough prototype of the
Apple iTimeTraveler?

I called Apple (AAPL) to see if they were working on some type of iTimeTraveler. Once again, no one would talk. But I’m sure their Time Travel device, when it is or is not released at the next Apple Lovefest, will be extremely thin and stylish, have WiFi, GPS, a non-removable battery, and be very expensive.

It turned out the guy at Best Buy was the most help. He referred me to a recent documentary film called “Primer” that shows all the steps some Silicon Valley engineering-type researchers took to create a crude yet workable time machine. It was crude because they could not secure any venture capital even after proving the device worked by sending a hamster back in time.

I was pretty skeptical, but this was no flashy Hollywood film like “Back To the Future” or “Groundhog Day”. This was a rough and tumble documentary. At least that’s what the guy at Best Buy said before he sold me his personal copy for $50.

My first reaction was that this time travel stuff could not be possible. But if you went back one hundred short years and told people we could talk to each other over great distances on a device the size of a wallet, they would think you were nuts. If you told people a hundred years ago that a man could circle the globe three times in less than five hours like John Glenn did on February 20, 1962, they would laugh at you. If you told people a hundred years ago that the US government would be bazillions of dollars in debt, mostly to Chinese and Middle Eastern Governments, they would have locked you up.  So why couldn’t these smart engineers from Silicon Valley build a time-travel device in a Public Storage locker and go back in time to make a killing in the stock market?

Unfortunately, even with the convenience of a slim, stylish iTimeTraveler in our pockets, we would probably just make a batch of new mistakes. And that bleeding from the ears and eyes thing seems like something worth calling tech support about.

Poster for that documentary on how those guys built the time travel machine without venture capital financing