[logfromblammo]

I did slip in "judicious use of insurance". Insuring against bad luck precludes making some additional investments that could take advantage of good luck.

But even so, ancestor post was not referring to people who failed to become millionaires due to bad luck, but the level of wealth one can attain without good luck. For those wealthier, someone can always come along, point to a spot in their life story and say, "here is where you got lucky". It might just be at t=0, when they were born to a statistically unlikely set of parents, but there will be something.

Perhaps Mark Cuban's dog liked the smell of your butt. Maybe you were assigned to be Martha Stewart's cellie in the clink. You wore a particularly ugly sweater during a nationally televised political forum. You lost a lot of weight eating sandwiches from one chain, just as that brand needed a new ad campaign, and they forgot to ask around among your former classmates about your non-dietary habits.

For every lucky break, there are plenty more people who toil away their whole lives and never get ahead. The ceiling for those who never catch a break is far, far below those who got lucky at least once.