One of the problems is that you mostly need money to make money.

There's an SF book called Replay that imagines a guy reliving his life from his fifties or so to his teens or so. One of the clever plot points (not really a spoiler) is that he just happens to remember a highly improbable sports result around the time of his replay which, with the help of some friends and family loans, makes him very wealthy. The book would have been a lot less interesting if the main characterer was just starting out as a poor college student over and over again.

Sure, I could have made money in dot-com/bomb (and maybe bitcoin) but I still would have needed a fair bit of capital to have made life-altering gains.

To the point of the article, predicting how most specific company or economic outcomes will affect stock prices is pretty much a sucker bet. Perhaps excluding some specific events like 9/11--but even that effect wasn't that great.

Bitcoin is not a good example for your argument. The first bitcoin transaction for a physical good was in 2010 where 10K of bitcoin was used to buy a couple pizzas.

Even the poorest American could probably have scraped enough together to own that much bitcoin back then. If they held onto it until now, they would be a billionaire!

If you really knew Bitcoin was going to be big with certainty/high probability, you could have mined it or done a dark alley transaction early on. Assuming you didn't get scammed out of or simply lost your wallet at some point, I agree, it's an exception where you could have made a fortune from basically nothing. (Though not in a day which is the actual experiment in question.)

The more interesting experiment to me would be if you gave me a week's worth (say) of the WSJ from ten years hence, what could I do with it?

I was replying to the comment that stated that you need a significant amount of capital in order to make life altering gains, even if you had a crystal ball.

I was arguing that with the right information, you could turn a few bucks into a massive fortune (bitcoin being a single example).

Rags to Riches and all that given a sufficiently long time horizon and the right drive and savvy, and luck. I do think there are relatively few cases where you can just drop someone in the right place at the right time with a few dollars and expect them to succeed, especially in the short-term.

Of course MOST rags to riches stories are accumulated over decades of hard work with some luck sprinkled in; but almost every day you hear of a few turning a few bucks into a fortune overnight. Lottery winners, meme stock traders, and sports betting are just a few examples.

Everyone knows it can happen. That is why get-rich-quick schemes work.

Sure, if I know the Powerball winner or some weird meme stock spike a day in advance, but that's getting a bit off the topic of seeing the front page of a major news source a day earlier for the most part. (And even the meme stock takes money to really take advantage of)

Don't look at the front page, go to the Market Digest and look up yesterday's changes in currency exchange rates or CME futures. Bet on those with 100x leverage and voilà!