This article makes an initial cut at realistic timelines to grow $1M for my particular situation, then creates some milestones so that I can track my progress and grow increasingly confident over time. This is not advice.
I characterize four paths by velocity. In the coming months, and perhaps years, we can check back to see which paths I remain nearest to.
Contribution Scenarios
In my recent article on Trade Ideas for March 9th, I noted that my current portfolio value is about $65k. Three initial scenarios come to mind:
A case where I make no further contributions to this nest egg.
Realistically, I will save more, but perhaps I don’t include those contributions into this $1M journey.
Having other accounts will influence my risk taking in this 65k portfolio, but I can potentially just call that out directly to make the picture clearer to the reader.
A case where I conservatively contribute 10k/year to the account.
A case where I more aggressively contribute 50k/year to the account.
This obvious tradeoff is that planning on more contribution makes achieving the goal easier, but the risk is that I don’t follow my own plan. So, I’ll mitigate this by planning on the range: Hoping for, planning for, and stretching for the best (3) while preparing for and minimally committing to the worst (1).
Nicely, this makes my committed contribution strategy impossible to fail. It also provides an actual expected value somewhere in between the timelines I’ll be calculating.
Besides the 65k cash already deployed, I also have a couple notable assets:
A home worth more than $1M and a 30 year mortgage on it.
Bitcoin mining equipment bringing in about 0.033 bitcoin each 4 months, though this is likely to decline over time so I’ll omit to count it at all in this analysis.
Still, it may contribute to performing over expectation later on so I’m calling it out.
Plus, I do get a tax benefit from writing off the depreciation of the mining hardware, but I won’t be going into that stuff in the current article.
Plus, it opens the possibility of obtaining a small business loan, which I’m happy to consider leveraging at some point.
Base Paths: Mostly Without Leverage
Now let’s consider some methods to achieve $1M and their required time:
Payoff my house. Takes 30 years total, or 25 incremental years.
Refinance my house to a 15 year mortgage and pay it off. Takes 15 years.
Achieve an account value of 100k then execute a 10X strategy.
Achieve an account value of 50-100k then execute 4-5 doubling strategies.
What are some such 10X and doubling strategies? That’s how I see the core problem in this journey.
10X Strategies
QQQ returned over 10X from 1999 to 2024. 1999 isn’t specially selected here, it’s just the inception year. That’s 25 years.
QQQ also returned 10X in as little as 15 years over the range from 2011 to today or 11 years from 2009 to 2020. The caveat here is you would need to time your entry very well. 2008 and 2009 were the low in QQQ after the Great Recession.
FNGO has achieved ~9X from inception in 2018 to today, over about 7.5 years.
You could also take smaller moves and leverage them.
FNGO itself is a 2X leveraged ETF.
FNGU is a similar ETF with 3X leverage and theoretically would have achieved 10X under 6 or 7 years, but it did a weird asset reset process, so I don’t trust the lookback data before 2025 after the current asset in its current form was launched.
Apparent lesson: 10x ROI requires smart entry and exit.
Apparent implication: Those people saying “don’t time the market” aren’t giving you the full picture. Usually, the advice (from others, I’m not giving advice here) is something like “don’t time the market, just dollar cost average into a proven index fund and hold until you reach your goal.” This leaves out the fact that they just told you a timing strategy. They literally said don’t time the market, just time the market.
If you buy a quality asset at the wrong time, you can make up for it with more time, but if you make a low-quality investment, your investment can go to zero regardless of timing. Smart entry and exit refers to both quality asset identification and effective entry and exit strategy, or timing strategy.
Dollar cost averaging and holding until a goal is reached is an entry and exit strategy. A proven index fund represents a quality asset. So, “dollar cost average into a proven index fund and hold until you reach your goal” only pretends to be an alternative to timing the market. Actually, it is a particular instance of smart entry and exit.
On Leverage
Notice that 10X strategies include a range of leverage strategies from zero leverage to low (as in the mortgage) to relatively high (as in FNGO). A common saying in financial investment is that leverage is risky and more risk generates more potential reward and also more potential loss. This is true in an important sense and also misleading in an important sense:
True component: Leverage increases risk.
False component: Risk is bad.
Risk is typically measured as price volatility. This means that an asset that moves up extremely quickly is identified as high risk. Comparing FNGO to FNGS, we can see a ~2X risk which is exactly what we expect because FNGO is 2X leveraged FNGS. The results?
The risk and negative drawdown stories hold true: When FNGS declines 1%, FNGO declines 2% and vice versa
The absolute max drawdown or max loss is not importantly different:
$100K into FNGO from inception faces a max loss of ~$40,000
$100K into FNGS from inception faces a max loss of ~$5,000
Big percentage difference, but not a big practical difference when considering our goal: Both options failed to reach $1M in the worst case.
Both of these options are worse than just holding cash if the goal is to avoid downside risk. In my $1M journey, avoiding downside risk is decidedly not my goal.
The positive risk story also plays out: FNGO has a max gain over 13X while FNGS has a max gain of about 6X. The points:
2X risk isn’t merely the chance of losing money. The same term “risk” can refer to the upside. It’s very important to distinguish upside risk and downside risk.
2X upside risk isn’t merely icing on the cake: It can represent a material difference in the ability to achieve a specific goal, such as being able to 10X in under 10 years.
So far, it seems to me that we can’t decide whether an investment is high quality purely on whether it makes use of leverage. So, how do I decide?
Personally, I do two things:
Is the expected return of margin capital significantly higher than the cost of margin?
Will my quality of life be meaningfully diminished if the leveraged cash goes to zero in value?
Example: I assess FNGS. Let’s imagine it’s 2023, so I’m bullish.
I could buy FNGS at 2X margin which has some margin cost that varies by platform. Let’s imagine I’m using Robinhood and they want to charge me a 6% margin rate.
The margin question becomes: How confident am I that FNGS will significantly beat 6%? Let’s say I call 9% or better a significant beat. If I expect that, I’ll be willing to pay the margin cost, assuming (i) I don’t have better uses of the same margin capital, and (ii) I only allocate an amount such that I could still have respect for myself in a future where this amount goes to zero. Notably: My family isn’t materially worse off.
Patience and Market Timing
One major insight from the section on 10X Strategies is that timing entry can cut your required time in the market in half. Exit is important too, but less so. Entering QQQ in March 2009 would permit exit after 11, 12, or 13 years, for instance.
Some people argue that you can’t or shouldn’t try to time the market. In contrast, I’ve argued that timing is inescapable, but I admit that it’s hard. One way to make timing easier is to ignore exit timing completely and focus on a strong entry. This also simplifies investment by reducing viable options to those where buy and indefinite hold is possible. So, this approach naturally excludes options trading, for example.
I want to argue for patience in this section and draw attention to the fact that holding cash is an active investment with return much greater than whatever small annual interest the cash account pays. First, you should overvalue that base interest rate relative to the stock market because it is incredibly low risk. Second, while your cash remains uninvested it continuously accrues a hard to observe return in the form of freedom and optionality. This value is your ability to make a better investment later.
This optionality has a cash value that can exceed 30% APR. Consider the case of entering QQQ in March 2009 mentioned at the top of this section. Now consider that you entered in March 2008 instead. Your price per share might have been $43 instead of $27. At the peak of 2021, you still would not have achieved the 10X ROI that the patient person had already attained. You would wait until 2024, about 16 years instead of about 12 years for the more patient person. In other words, the patient person achieved a return of 4 years by waiting 1 year, a 400% return! More conservatively, we can say that the patient person avoided the $16 loss per share accrued by the 2008 investor, which would have been a loss of over 35% in one year on the input of $43.
My hope is this should cause you to quickly lose your itch to deploy cash and it should completely demolish the idea that cash in a bank account is doing little to no work.
Finally, while timing is hard an inescapable, my hot take is that it gets even harder when we try to time an investment in a rush and it gets a little easier when we have patience. While the cash sits relatively safely in the bank, we can use our time to analyze opportunities, and that analysis time itself also can also make timing easier and more effective. Specific things to analyze: asset kind, category, and relation to ongoing news and economy; price targets, entry strategy, and alignment to one’s own budget, conscious of the timing of your own budget too. For example, you might want to spend on gifts during Christmas, so capital contribution might be easier in June.
Doubling Scenarios
There’s a theoretical tradeoff that isn’t practically that important. Theoretically, there are some 10X strategies that cannot be decomposed to a collection of doubling strategies, and there are doubling collections that lose a bit of momentum by exiting at the double and entering into a new position. There’s a bit of a tax to breaking up some 10X strategies into a series of doubles.
Practically, the tax is small and worth it to me. I don’t want to risk failing an irreducible 8-15 year 10X strategy. I’d rather just pay off a 15 year mortgage. On the other hand, if I can find some relatively quick doubling strategies, I don’t mind failing on some of those, provided the probability is that I will save significant time overall.
This decision varies by person. It’s subjective. How much do you value time, risk, money, and stress? A collection of doubling strategies and the associated risks is surely more stressful and risky than just paying off a 15 year mortgage. It’s subjective, but personally I’d want to beat 10 years or otherwise I’d probably just go for the mortgage. Yet, we did already uncover one strategy, the FNGO strategy, which could 10X within this time frame. Both the FNGO strategy and the QQQ strategy have doubling equivalents with shorter time frames:
Over the past five years, QQQ (90% return) and TQQQ (110% return) both roughly doubled, and even more precisely hit 100% ROI if you consider a 50/50 weighted basket.
FNGO doubled in 1 year from Jan 2024 to Jan 2025. Notably, it’s at about the same price in Jan 2026 because market go uppy then downy, so let’s be more conservative and count on an FNGO double about every 2 years.
It’s done 150% over the past 5 years which is probably a more precise velocity measure, though it doesn’t exactly map on to the doubling concept.
FNGO also doubled inside of a single year in 2025, though this requires skillful timing and it was on the back of the Trump tariffs, a rare and relatively unique kind of event.
The price of bitcoin doubled from 2021 to 2025
It also doubled from 2023 to 2024
It also 7X’d from 2022 to 2025 if you timed very well.
Oil, silver, gold, and various other smart trades double within a year’s time, but these smart trades are often very hard to identify. I’m all for trying these out as long as risk can be accounted for.
Leverage Time, Baby
I can get to $1M with three successful doublings and significant contribution along the way. I earlier mentioned 4-5 doublings to allow some room for doubling trade failure and contribution slack.
With leverage, hitting milestones gets even easier to imagine, but it’s not easier in reality. It’s just easier to imagine.
In reality, there’s no free lunch. Leverage doesn’t alter time or eliminate business cycles. Leverage in a bull market will get you to $1M or $X quicker, but leverage in general will just amplify the growth and the pain, plus you get to pay an extra fee for the amplification ability. I emphasize this all to triple down on my perspective that I don’t think you get away from timing the market to some degree. At a minimum, being able to distinguish a bullish market regime from a bearish or recessionary regime is a superpower.
I’m personally trying to earn a bit in both regimes: Shorting in bear markets and going long in bull markets, but I do not do this symmetrically. I am much more risk averse and willing to stay in cash and deleverage in bear markets. I do this because empirically bear markets are shorter, more volatile, and I like Friedman’s plucking model of the economy which indicates that positive growth is always and everywhere going on behind the scenes, so negative downturns are usually relatively transient. Not advice, as usual, just sharing my own perspective, bias, and approach.
Futures enable me to trade the Nasdaq, bitcoin, and some other assets with up to about 3x leverage. Options can allow a bit more leverage but it’s complicated by so-called greek effects like theta decay. Basically, you need to be even more careful and confident with timing for options. Another technique is trading on margin, which acts basically like a personal loan and has an APR.
Buying leveraged ETFs on margin is a strategy that I don’t hear other people talk about much, but it can allow access to approximately 3-6X leverage without standard liquidation risks and complex options valuation issues. As previously noted, FNGO went up 150% over the last 5 years. Buying this twice on margin would allow me to access 3X return over the last 5 years, less the 5-15% APR for the margin.
3-5 doublings plus contribution would get me to $1M, but two triples plus contributions could also get me to $1M! With a scenario similar to the prior 5 years in FNGO playing out, that would still take about 10 years, but:
FNGO can double in a year with well-done timing.
FNGO is native 2X leverage and FNGU exists with native 3X leverage.
So, FNGU can triple in a year with well-done timing, which it did in 2025. Buying this twice on margin could theoretically 6X inside of a year, though practically for risk control reasons I would probably fade it in and out, gaining effectively lower than 6X leverage.
So, theoretically, there’s a path to 6X in a year. I’ll put the path marker at 4X in a single year because that importantly changes my requirement from needing 4-5 good years via doubling to needing as little as 2 good years.
The Four Paths
In summary, here are the four paths, from slow to fast:
15 years: Refi my house and pay it off
~10 years: Moderately good timing long assets like QQQ and FNGO
4-8 years: Bull cycle kicks off in the next 2 years and I go leveraged long into assets like FNGO, FNGU, and bitcoin with moderately good timing and contributions
Under 4 years. This could happen by modification to scenario 3 through a number of possible vectors:
A bull cycle kicks off this year or next year, or I manage to do well enough in the bear regime to effectively compensate
Contributions are higher than expected, perhaps due to a bonus or a cash out refi on my home
My ability to find smart trades and time them correctly is stronger than expected
Rather than targeting any particular path, my current target is just to achieve an account value of $100k in 2026. Follow along as I continue my planning and analysis, because my moves if and after I hit that mark will depend on my expectation of recession, growth, bull, or bear regime over the next few years!