$500 Into $2 Million Is 8.93 Percent a Year
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10 SEPTEMBER 2026
By Mike Leesponsored Seven Signs, All Flashing Red |
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Three Numbers to Start
8.93% | the annual return implied by turning $500 into $2 million between 1929 and today. A broad index did roughly 10%. |
$100 | Brent crude, which broke through that level this week on renewed Middle East tension. |
8:30 | tomorrow morning, when August inflation lands. It is the last reading the Fed sees before it meets. |
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An Indicator That Predicted Every Crash Was Chosen Because It Did
Any claim that a signal has called every downturn since 1929 is worth taking seriously for about thirty seconds, and the reason it fails is not that the person is lying. The record is usually accurate. The problem is how the record was assembled.
Start with the arithmetic of searching. Suppose you have a century of monthly data and several hundred candidate indicators — yield spreads, credit spreads, valuation ratios, money supply measures, sentiment surveys, housing starts, freight volumes. Test each one against the dozen or so recessions in that century and some will line up perfectly by chance alone. Not because they cause anything. Because you looked at enough of them.
This is overfitting, and it is the single most common error in market research. A rule tuned until it fits the past exactly has been fitted to the noise as well as to the signal, and noise does not repeat.
The second problem is the denominator. A signal that predicted every recession may also have predicted eleven recessions that never arrived. Both statements can be true at once, and only the first one appears in the marketing. Paul Samuelson made the joke in 1966 and it has aged well: the stock market has predicted nine of the last five recessions.
There is a specific version worth knowing because it costs people real money. An indicator that is genuinely good at calling downturns will fire early, sometimes years early, because it responds to conditions that build slowly. Someone who acted on a correct signal in 1996 or in 2015 would have sat out enormous gains waiting for a decline that eventually came and did not recover the difference.
Being right and being early are the same thing in prospect and completely different things in a brokerage account.
None of which means indicators are useless. It means the honest question about any of them is not whether it called past crashes. It is how many times it fired without one, how long the average lead was, and what it would have cost to sit in cash for that long. Those three numbers are almost never in the material, and any of them can be worked out by whoever assembled it.
A Patent Is a Claim, Not a Working Product
A recurring shape in investment promotions is the newly published patent, presented as evidence that something is about to happen. It is worth being precise about what a patent actually establishes, because it is less than people assume.
A patent grants exclusive rights to an invention. It does not certify that the invention works, that it can be manufactured at scale, or that anybody intends to build it. Patent offices assess novelty, non-obviousness and utility on paper. They do not run the machine.
There is a live example from this same company, and it is instructive. Earlier this year patents appeared describing a robotic hand mechanism, and coverage treated them as the breakthrough that would make humanoid robots commercially useful. Musk subsequently said publicly that the patented rolling-contact arrangement did not work in the real world despite working in simulation. The patent was real. The mechanism was not viable.
So when a promotion pairs a patent number with a growth projection, those two things are not connected by anything. The patent is a public document with a filing date. The projection is somebody’s opinion about a market that does not exist yet.
The useful question when a patent is presented as an investment case: has the company said it is shipping this, has anyone independent tested it, and does the filing describe a component or a whole system? A patent on one mechanism inside a machine is not a patent on the machine.
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$500 Into $2 Million Is 8.93 Percent a Year
Here is a claim worth running the arithmetic on, because the arithmetic is the whole story and anybody can do it in a minute.
A young analyst turns $500 into what would be worth $2 million today, starting in 1929. The figure is presented as evidence of an extraordinary method.
From 1929 to now is 97 years. Turning $500 into $2 million means multiplying by 4,000. To find the annual return, take the 97th root of 4,000. It comes to 8.93% a year.
Now the comparison. A broad American stock index, held through the whole period with dividends reinvested, returned roughly 10% a year. Put $500 into that in 1929 and you finish with about $5.2 million.
The claimed result is a little over a third of what doing nothing in particular would have produced.
The gap between the two annual figures is 1.07 percentage points. Over 97 years that gap is worth about $3.2 million. This is the part of compounding that nobody has an intuition for, and it cuts both ways — it is why a one percent fee matters, and it is why an impressive-sounding total can describe an ordinary or below-ordinary result.
But it is presented as proof of a system, and the arithmetic says the system underperformed the index it was meant to beat.
The general rule is short enough to keep. Any before-and-after figure is meaningless without the number of years. Convert it to an annual rate, compare that to what an index did over the same period, and most extraordinary claims resolve into ordinary ones. The conversion takes a calculator and thirty seconds.
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Inflation Lands Tomorrow and Brent Has Crossed $100
Tomorrow | 8:30 in the morning — August consumer prices. The last reading before the meeting. |
15–16 | September — the Federal Open Market Committee meets. |
3.50% | the bottom of the current target range. Three members dissented in July in favour of a rise. |
Headline inflation ran at 3.4% in July and is expected to ease slightly to 3.3%. Core prices, which strip out food and energy, are forecast to accelerate a little on the month.
That combination is awkward. A falling headline with firming core is the pattern that gives a central bank the least useful information, because the part that is falling is the part it does not control and the part that is firming is the part it does.
Underneath it sits energy. Brent crude has broken above $100 on renewed Middle East tension, and one strategist described the level as a psychological milestone with a bigger concern behind it — a prolonged oil shock keeping price pressure elevated and complicating the path for a central bank already in a difficult position.
The September meeting is genuinely open. The July vote produced three dissents in favour of a rise, Warsh has published no reaction function, and the futures market has moved back and forth all week. Tomorrow’s print is the last input.
If you are watching for a signal rather than a headline, the two-year Treasury yield in the minutes after 8:30 will tell you what the market concluded faster than any commentary will.
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Ninety-Seven Years, and One Percentage Point
$3.2m | the difference between compounding $500 at 8.93% and at 10% over 97 years. The annual gap is barely one percentage point. Any before-and-after figure without a number of years attached is not yet information. |
Forget the hot picks — protect what you’ve already built, and turn every before-and-after number into an annual rate before you decide whether it is impressive. Because the best trade you’ll ever make is the loss you never took. Mike LeeDeals CatchersThanks for reading. See you tomorrow. |
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