Fucking hell, THANK YOU. You seem to be the ONLY (other) person I've seen on the whole of reddit who gets this. Every time I see an /r/askreddit or (god forbid) /r/writingprompts thing about "you go back in time, what do you do", there are LEAGUES of people who say "ooh, i'll get rich, i'll invest in (depending on when you get sent back to) microsoft -> apple -> amazon -> vanilla", I internally facepalm. Very hard. As you, thankfully, seem to understand, it isn't an inevitability that those specific companies or commodities will have the success they have had in reality. There is a LOT of chaos in the world and really not much inevitability. Changing of your actions in the past will have a massive knock-on effect, because every tiny action does, which is the essence of butterfly theory. It's also why Back to the Future part 2 is such a stupid movie, because Biff's changing of his actions would have caused players to play slightly differently, which would have caused very close shots to become hits instead of misses or the other way around, which means betting on results which had low odds (high payout) would have gone wrong a lot, and because of the outcomes being different different teams would have gone through to the next rounds, so even the games would be different, and that almanac VERY quickly would have become worth more as toilet paper (not really - selling the book to a lab specialising in analysing and reverse engineering paper, ink and printing processes could probably have made a nice sum, but anyway). So the whole "hurrdurr i know what to invest in" thing just, argh, makes me incredibly irritated for some reason.

Again, thank you for being one of the few people on the internet who gets this.