How long until this doubles your money?
Doubling time is the fastest way to feel a rate. Two percent a month sounds modest and doubles a balance in under three years; ten percent a month doubles it in seven months. This page shows both the shortcut and the exact figure.
Enter the numbers
Far above anything supervised finance guarantees
Returns this size exist only inside leveraged trading, private equity and a handful of short-lived funds - never as a fixed, guaranteed rate paid to the public. A guarantee at this level is paid from the money coming in after you.
| Target | Amount | Time to get there |
|---|---|---|
| 2x | $2.0K | 35 days |
| 10x | $10.0K | 4 months |
| 100x | $100.0K | 8 months |
| 1000x | $1.0M | 11 months |
Time to multiply by M = ln(M) / ln(1 + rate).
The red line
A guaranteed return higher than a Treasury bill or an insured deposit cannot exist. Every dollar paid above the risk-free rate is paid for with risk, leverage, or other people's deposits. A published promise of a fixed return above the risk-free rate is the definition of a return trap.
Reading the result
- The rule of 72 is an approximation for small rates: divide 72 by the rate to get the number of periods. The exact figure uses natural logarithms and appears in the second metric.
- Doubling is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that reaching 100x or 1,000x requires the same rate to work on an ever-larger balance, which is where real schemes break.
Questions this calculator answers
- Why does the rule of 72 work?Because ln(1+r) is close to r for small r, so the exact doubling time ln(2)/ln(1+r) is close to 0.693/r, and 72/r is that value expressed per hundred. It drifts for rates above roughly 15%.
- What if the promoter says it doubles in 30 days?Then the implied daily rate is about 2.34%, roughly 4,000% a year compounded. Check it against the table above: at that pace a small deposit passes every reference level within days.
- Does compounding always work in the investor's favour?No. The same curve applies to fees, to losses and to the growth in deposits a scheme needs to keep paying. That is why the payout tool on this site looks at money flow rather than return.
These are arithmetic tools, not investment advice, and no calculator can tell you whether a particular operator is honest. What the arithmetic does show is whether the advertised return could come from a supervised product at all. To see the returns that are being promised in the wild, read the register, or the method and math page for how entries are built.