Most return claims can be refused before you check anything about who is making them. Compounding turns a modest-sounding weekly rate into a number that answers the question on its own.

A claim you can check without knowing anything about the channel

Someone on Reddit was offered a trade in a Telegram message: send $200, receive about $3,500 in forty-eight hours. He sent 190.89 USDT, was asked for his wallet recovery phrase, refused, and wrote the whole exchange up so the next person would recognise it.

The comments are worth reading, because the strongest reply is not moral. It is arithmetic. One reader points out that if the offer were real, the obvious move is to take the $3,500 and put it through the same machine twice more — which turns $200 into roughly a million dollars inside a week.

That is the whole test. Nothing about the channel, its screenshots, its subscriber count or its reviews entered into it. A return rate is a claim about repetition, and a rate you can repeat is a rate that compounds. Compound it, and most claims answer the question themselves.

The rate sounds small. The year does not.

Nobody advertises a yearly figure, because yearly figures are where the claim falls apart. What gets advertised is a daily or weekly rate, small enough to sound like ordinary discipline. Here is what those rates commit their author to over a single year, starting from $1,000.

The advertised rate Over a year $1,000 becomes
10% a month ×3.1 $3,138
20% a month ×8.9 $8,916
5% a week ×12.6 $12,643
1% a day (250 trading days) ×12.0 $12,032
10% a week ×142 $142,043
2% a day ×141 $141,268
5% a day ×198,301 $198,300,938

"Ten percent a week" is the one worth sitting with, because it is the rate that gets advertised most and sounds the most reasonable. It is a promise to turn a thousand dollars into a hundred and forty-two thousand in twelve months. Run it for five years and the same rate produces about fifty-eight billion dollars from the same thousand.

What the best results in recorded history look like

Berkshire Hathaway compounded at roughly 19.8% a year for fifty-eight years, which is the most closely watched long-run record in public markets. Renaissance Technologies' Medallion fund is the outlier people reach for when they argue the limits of what is possible. It compounded at 63.3% a year before fees from 1988 to 2018, turning $100 into $398.7 million, and never had a losing year in thirty-one.

Set those against the table. A channel advertising 10% a week is advertising roughly 14,100% a year: around seven hundred times Berkshire's rate and more than two hundred times Medallion's. It is claiming, in a Telegram post, to have beaten every documented result in the history of the industry by two orders of magnitude, and to be selling access to it for a monthly fee.

One more number from Medallion is worth carrying around. Its trades were right about 50.75% of the time. The greatest performance record ever measured was built on being correct barely more often than a coin, across millions of positions. Remember that the next time a channel advertises 90% accuracy as though such a figure were a selling point.

The claim is not unlikely. It is arithmetically closed. Any rate that could be sustained at that level would make its owner richer than selling it ever could, which is the same observation the Reddit commenter made from the other direction.

Why the money still arrives

None of this stops the schemes from working, because the returns were never coming from trading. They come from the next subscriber, the upgrade to the VIP tier, the affiliate rebate on the exchange you were told to sign up with. We have written up how that money actually flows in detail; the short version is that an operator running a hundred-dollar account of his own does not need winning trades, he needs new arrivals.

This is why early withdrawals prove so little. Being paid once tells you a withdrawal was permitted, not that the account behind it is real — and it is often the cheapest thing the operator will ever buy, because it converts a sceptic into a reference.

What the test cannot do

It only works in one direction. A promise that fails the compounding test is finished: no further checking is required, and no track record could rescue it. A promise that passes has told you nothing except that it is not immediately absurd.

Plenty of channels advertise nothing at all: no percentage, no target, just calls. The compounding test has no grip on those, and most of the work of judging a channel starts there instead. Do its published calls survive being replayed against real prices? Is the sample large enough to mean anything? Does the equity screenshot match an account that exists? Those are the questions behind why a win rate alone settles nothing, how many trades a hit rate needs and what a P&L screenshot can be made to say.

The test, in full

Take the rate as advertised. Raise it to the number of periods in a year — 12 for monthly, 52 for weekly, 250 for daily on trading days. Multiply by a starting balance you can picture. Then ask whether the person making the offer would be selling it to you at that price.

It takes a minute, needs no access to anything, and disposes of a large share of what gets sold in this market before you have spent anything at all.

Sources

Compounding figures in the table are computed from the advertised rate: 12 periods a year for monthly, 52 for weekly, 250 trading days for daily.