Every few months a new product promises a fixed monthly return: 10% a month, 5% a week, “capital doubled in 90 days”. You do not need to investigate the company to know the claim is false. The arithmetic settles it before anyone opens the books.
The arithmetic
10% a month compounds to about 3.1 times your money in a year. That already sounds implausible. Follow it a little further and it stops being a business claim and becomes a joke:
| If $1,000 really compounded at 10% a month | It would become |
|---|---|
| After 1 year | ≈ $3,100 |
| After 3 years | ≈ $31,000 |
| After 5 years | ≈ $304,000 |
| After 10 years | ≈ $92,000,000 |
Nobody has ever done this, and nobody ever will. If a method existed that produced 10% a month for a decade, its owner would not be selling it to you for a fee — the arithmetic above is the entire reason why. So when an operator promises a fixed monthly return, there are only a few possibilities: the returns are being paid out of other people's deposits, the account is real but the published numbers are not, or the strategy is quietly taking a risk that will one day take everything back at once.
This applies to the well-dressed version too. A polished dashboard, a licence number in the footer and a smiling founder do not change the exponent.
What a real record looks like
It looks boring, and it is full of losses at close range. Our own tested record over 23.5 years averages 31.8% a year at the default setting on a ¥1,000,000 (≈ $6,500) account, with a worst drawdown of 9.07%. Measured on the same system at ¥100,000: roughly two days in five close in the red and 64 of the 282 months tested lost money; on the fixed-size run the account once went 246 days without setting a new high. No year in the test finished negative — which is the kind of claim you should refuse to accept without looking at why.
Those numbers are a simulation over historical prices, not a prediction, and we publish every file behind them precisely so that you can attack them rather than believe them. The difference between this and a fixed monthly promise is not the size of the return. It is that the unflattering parts — the losing days, the eight months without a new high, the settings at which the system breaks — are printed next to the good ones instead of being left out.
The opponent is your own hands
Most people who lose money in markets do not lose it because their method was wrong. They lose it because they abandoned the method at the worst possible moment — doubling the position size to recover a bad week, closing a sound position out of fear, or entering one more trade at midnight because the day felt wrong.
Rules executed by software do not have those moments. That is the whole value proposition, and it is a modest one: not a better prediction of the market, just the removal of the part of the process that is you. You do not have to become a trader, watch charts, or learn to read candles. You do have to decide how much money is allowed into it, which is a decision no software should make for you.
Time is the one input you cannot compress
Take the tested average of 31.8% a year and apply it to $5,000: after twelve months you have about $6,590, and you will have spent that year watching a number fall on two days out of five. For most people that is underwhelming — which is exactly why the fraudulent version of this industry exists. It sells the feeling of skipping the boring part.
The same rate over longer periods is where the interesting behaviour is: roughly 16× over ten years. Those are the returns in this kind of system — not any single year, but a long series of ordinary ones left uninterrupted.
Both figures above are arithmetic on a past average, not measured results for an account of that size, and every assumption behind them is optimistic. They assume the tested average simply repeats; that the trade size keeps growing without meeting a broker's lot ceiling; and that nothing is withdrawn. They also ignore the effect of account size itself: the minimum trade size in MetaTrader is fixed, and with four engines each trading that minimum, a small account cannot take less risk than the platform allows — on a ¥100,000 (≈ $650) account the drawdown floor is 12.34% however low the setting goes, while from about ¥200,000 (≈ $1,300) it falls into the 8.7–9.1% band. The measured record is here; treat these multiples as a way of seeing where compounding gets its power, not as a forecast for your account.
You can run the arithmetic on your own numbers with our compound calculator. It runs entirely in your browser and sends nothing anywhere.
The costs, before the returns
Any honest calculation subtracts costs first. Software like this has a purchase price, and it needs a machine that stays on — a virtual private server, typically a few dollars a month. On a small account those fixed costs eat a visible share of the first year's return; on a larger one they become a rounding error. This is one of the reasons we do not tell people to start with whatever they can scrape together. Below a certain account size, the costs make the maths work against you no matter how good the software is.
An honest list of what can go wrong
- Drawdown periods are certain. The tested record has a 9.07% worst case at the default setting on a ¥1,000,000 account, 12.34% on a ¥100,000 one, and the worst fall inside a single year was 23.5%. A real account can be worse. If a 10% fall in your balance would make you switch it off, this is not a good fit.
- Past results, including a 23.5-year test, do not predict future results. Markets change structure. A rule set that survived 2008 and 2020 can still fail in a regime nobody has traded yet.
- Live results differ from tests. Spreads widen, orders slip, and brokers differ from one another. This is why the live account is published as a public signal rather than described in a testimonial — and why the current version, live since July 2026, has almost no forward record yet.
- Leverage cuts both ways. Trading with leverage can lose money faster than any other part of a normal portfolio. Only money you have deliberately set aside for that risk belongs here.
- We are not a regulated financial institution. We write software. Nothing on this site is advice, and no one at TOKYO-EA ever holds or moves your money. See how the business works.
If reading that list made the product less attractive, the list is doing its job. The alternative — a page that lists only the upside — is the format used by everyone who eventually disappears.