Yeah, Harry discovered that you can't transmute something that hasn't already been created through more conventional means.

You sound like you think he doesn't need capital at all. Why would Harry avoid using a resource that would facilitate reaching his goals? Wouldn't the rational thing to do be to use the methods that accomplish your goals in an effective and timely manner?

There are times when solutions other than money would be more effective, and there are times when money would be more effective or efficient. So why should he eschew that resource just because he can?

Entirely the wrong question. Harry Potter is planning on taking over both the Muggle and Magical world. That's going to take some capital!

So, just to clarify, by DIY you mean one person effects the entire genocide rather than many people personally involved in the genocide, doing the killing themselves. In a sense, the Y in your DIY is singular, and the Y in mine is plural.

Also, my general schema of "DIY" is that it's a cheaper but more difficult alternative to the normal approach--which usually involves hiring someone to do your project for you or buying a ready-made product. Since most genocides tend to be executed the hard way-- you can't buy genocide in a box, although some chemical weapons might come close-- I felt that genocide is fundamentally a DIY project. It's just a ... fun ... project for the whole community, rather than one person. Like building a playground. That kills people. (This is going to a very bad place isn't it?)

I'm able to accept your definition of DIY, though I still prefer to think that genocides require a certain degree of personal agency from its participants and that second person pronouns can be plural.

That's true, but to make the REALLY big bucks, you need to make the bet no one else does a la Trading Places.

I think the idea was that with Harry the requirements of the ritual were fulfilled, though accidentally. One of those requirements is the death of an innocent.

But the HP wiki says that there's some kind of incantation that goes along with it, so that's either optional or... whatever. It seems to be like the Goblet of Fire portkey. The rule is the rule except when it isn't.

The biggest difference between Harry-as-horcrux and Quirrel-as-horcrux is that Voldemort doesn't seem to have killed anyone (as far as we know) to possess Quirrel. So even if Harry might have accidentally become a horcrux, Quirrel didn't, although he might have served the same purpose a horcrux does in "keeping the soul anchored to the mortal world."

I'm definitely not trying to argue that these things are consistent here, though. The point is that when people say something is "effectively" something else, they mean "practically" or "almost" rather than "actually." Unless someone finds some corpus data that suggests that Rowling's dialect (or, hell, her ideolect might be workable since she HAS written several rather large books) has a different usage...

Except that observed information can't be changed using the Time-Turners. So the scope of his actions are somewhat limited. Doesn't stop him from being able to short a stock, but he can't single-handedly cause a stock's fortune to reverse. That still leaves plenty of possibilities to make money, but it wouldn't be as easy as it sounds. He'd be mixing the complicated natures of stock trading and time travel, and that's before he starts thinking about avoiding insider trading laws.

"Effective" is not the same as "actual." Quirrel wasn't a horcrux in the sense that Harry or Nagini were horcruxes, even with what she's saying there. She just meant to say that Quirrel was like a horcrux. No ritual was done to make him into a horcrux.

That's true. Everyone's talking so much about stealing gold and magical artifacts that I didn't think of magical services.

I think even simpler than this is the fact that the wizards don't have anything of worth to trade to the Muggles, since non-magical people have a hard time even seeing magical artifacts, much less using them.

Muggles have plenty of things that would be useful to Wizards, but the reverse isn't true.