(MONEY Magazine) – So you want to get rich, but opening a hotel in East Timor isn't what you had in mind? Don't worry, you're not alone. Few people have the temperament for the topsy-turvy entrepreneurial lifestyle, and even fewer would uproot their families for a job halfway across the globe. For the stay-at-home majority, the stock market is still the most attractive, and realistic, place to seek a fortune.

When it comes to investing, a disciplined, diversified strategy remains the surest way to build wealth. Here, caution is a virtue. But that doesn't mean you can't take a small portion of your stake--5%, say--and swing for the fences. Of course, making big bucks means taking big risks. To hit the occasional home run, you must tolerate more than a few strikeouts. But that home run can deliver something muni bonds, index funds and dividend stocks cannot: the lifestyle-altering windfall so many of us seek, be it enough money for a down payment on a second home or cash to buy a sports car for the weekend.

The majority of investors may not beat the market--and the 7% to 9% average annual returns pundits are conditioning us for are nothing to scoff at--but opportunities remain for investors willing to take a flier. Below, we lay out three of today's most compelling ones.

UP THE ANTE ON A RECOVERY

The standard way to juice your returns is to invest with borrowed money. With most brokers, you can borrow up to half the value of your portfolio through what is known as a margin loan. Problem is, your broker may have to sell your shares quickly if stocks decline. Margin loans used to be the only way for nonprofessional investors to make leveraged bets on stocks, but today there are more choices. Leveraged mutual funds--offered mainly by Rydex ($25,000 minimum if you invest directly, $2,500 or less through brokers; 800-820-0888) and ProFunds ($15,000 minimum direct, $5,000 through brokers; 888-776-3637)--are nice alternatives for aggressive investors who don't relish the threat of a margin call. Rydex Titan, for example, is set up to net two times the return--up or down--of the S&P 500. ProFunds' Biotechnology UltraSector aims for a return equivalent to 1.5 times the performance of the Dow Jones U.S. Biotechnology Index.

More sophisticated investors might want to consider options, which are fairly easy to trade online. Say you believe semiconductor equipment company Applied Materials is on the verge of a big upswing. For about $230, you could buy a call option that gives you the right to purchase 100 shares for $20 a share on or before January 2005. If the stock, now $16, were to double to $32 over the next 17 months, you'd make $970. That's a 322% total return, as opposed to 100% had you bought the 100 shares instead. Yes, you'll lose the $230 option price if the stock doesn't hit $20, but that's all you'll lose. "What's nice about options is they're a right to buy a stock as opposed to an obligation," says Peter Dunay, market strategist for online broker Wall Street Access.

GO ON THE OFFENSE WITH RATES

With 10-year Treasuries yielding a mere 3.35%, many believe that interest rates have finally reached a trough. Yet until recently, individual investors who anticipated higher rates had few ways to make money on that assumption. Yes, you could replace longer-term bonds (those most vulnerable to rising rates) with bonds of shorter maturities. But that doesn't give you upside when rates rise; it only protects your capital.

Today, Rydex and ProFunds offer small investors a way to make money when rates rise (and bond prices fall). The Rydex Juno fund is structured to move in the opposite direction of the price of the 30-year Treasury bond. ProFunds Rising Rate Opportunity uses leverage to up the ante: It will move 1.25% for every 1% the price of the long Treasury bond goes up or down. Had you foreseen Treasury yields rising 1.3 percentage points in 1999, for instance, a $10,000 investment in Rydex Juno would have earned you $2,000.

TRY FOR THE JACKPOT

Everyone dreams of finding the next Dell or Microsoft and turning a $10,000 investment into a $500,000 windfall. Trouble is, these big winners are nearly impossible to identify in advance, making the quest for such stocks Wall Street's ultimate crapshoot. Keeping these very tough odds in mind, we queried several veteran fund managers about their long shots--stocks too unproven to be top holdings but too intriguing, they say, not to own at all. Of the interesting ideas we heard, these are our three favorites.

--United Online (UNTD). The parent company of dial-up Internet service providers Juno and NetZero, United Online is on one side of the vice squeezing leading ISPs America Online (owned by MONEY's parent) and Earthlink, contends Mark Herskovitz, manager of the Dreyfus Premier Technology Growth fund. Herskovitz envisions a bipolar world in which Net users pay either $10 a month for a no-frills service like Juno or $45 a month for broadband, rather than $24 a month for AOL's core dial-up service.

--Dillard's (DDS). This pick is courtesy of First Eagle Global's Jean-Marie Eveillard. (Hey, even value managers swing for the fences on occasion.) A struggling chain of department stores, Dillard's would be a hot takeover play if the Dillard family did not control the voting shares. But family control hasn't scared off Eveillard: "People forget that families are not usually united." Dillard's, now $13.50 a share, could be worth $40 in a buyout by May or Federated, he says.

--Roxio (ROXI). Recommended by Firsthand Funds' Kevin Landis, Roxio is an obscure little software company you'll probably be hearing more about. Last November, Roxio spent $5 million to buy the name, patents and website of the bankrupt music-swapping service Napster. Since then, Roxio has entered into licensing deals with all the major record labels and big independents, and will soon relaunch Napster as a legitimate online music site. It remains to be seen whether onetime Napster users will return to pay for music that they once swapped for free. But Landis is hopeful: "Now that Apple has demonstrated [with iTunes Music Store] that people are willing to pay a reasonable amount of money for online music, Roxio now has a chance to do that for the 90% of consumers who are on PCs."

At $6 a share, Roxio has a market cap of only $120 million. If the Napster relaunch is successful, Landis believes Roxio would be deserving of the same $2 billion or $3 billion valuation that Google is expected to get from its IPO. In other words, a true potential jackpot stock.