Set whatever a coach, guru, or finance-bro promises you per year, and watch it tower over Buffett, Lynch, and the greatest fund in history. Then watch what that return would do if it were real — and why someone who could actually deliver it would never sell you the course. Every record sourced.
Enter whatever a coach, guru, or finance-bro is promising you— as a yearly percentage, or as the “turn $X into $Y” story they actually tell. Watch where it lands against the best investors who have ever lived, and what it would do if it were real. This isn't advice. It's a sense of scale.
“They say I can make 30% a year, and it costs me $500 to learn how.”
The promise vs. the best on record
You are now being promised more than Warren Buffett's lifetime average. Sustained, that has been done by vanishingly few humans, and none of them advertised.
The compounding tell
The $500 you'd hand over for the course, compounded at 30% a year instead, becomes
$95,025
in 20 years.
That same $500 crosses $1 billion in
55 years
starting from the price of a course.
The climb to your first billion
$1B in 55yNearly flat, then it rockets — from a $500 stake to a billion dollars in 55 years, and it doesn't even slow down there.
If they could actually do this with their own money, the $500 would make them rich on its own. Instead they'd rather have it from you, today. The sale is the tell.
An uncertain 30% on your money, that depends on a market nobody controls, and that the best in history rarely match.
A guaranteed $500,000 from selling that $500 course to 1,000 people — today, regardless of the market. One of these two incomes is real. It isn't the one they're showing you.
The records, sourced
This is a sense of proportion, not investment advice. A high promised number isn't proof of fraud, and a real edge can exist — for a while, on small money, before it's arbitraged away. The records above are net long-run averages; any single year can beat them. The point stands: the people who genuinely compound at these rates manage money. They don't sell the secret for $500.