Compounding from 10M to 100M: a realistic path
Ten times your bank sounds like a different league. It is one exponent, and the exponent is unforgiving in both directions: small daily percentages get there surprisingly fast, and the daily percentage falls exactly as the bank gets big enough to matter.
Nothing on this page is a forecast of what you will make. It is arithmetic you can apply to a growth rate you measure yourself, plus the specific reasons that rate does not stay constant.
The arithmetic, plainly
Growing a bank by a fixed percentage each day means multiplying, not adding. Ten times means you need the daily multiplier raised to the number of days to reach 10, and that turns into a short table.
Days for a bank to reach ten times its starting size at a constant daily rate.
Two things stand out. The first is how small the required rate is: one percent a day, which on a 10M bank is 100,000 gp, gets you to 100M inside eight months. The second is how violent the top of the table is. Doubling your rate from 2% to 5% does not halve the time, it cuts it by 60%, which is why every percentage point of consistency is worth more than any single good trade.
Where your rate actually comes from
Your daily rate is realised profit after tax divided by the gold you had working, and the only place to get it honestly is a ledger. If you have not read lesson 2, read it before you use any number on this page, because a rate estimated from memory is always too high.
Take four weeks of realised profit from My Flips, divide by 28, then divide by your typical committed gold. That fraction is your r. Most people are startled by how much lower it is than they assumed, and equally startled by how much it still compounds to.
Four weeks realised: 31.4M. Typical committed: 16M.
Per day: 31.4M ÷ 28 = 1.12M. Daily rate: 1.12M ÷ 16M = 7%.
That is a genuinely strong rate at a small bank size, and it is exactly the rate you should not expect to keep at 80M, for the reasons below.
How many windows you really get
A day contains six four hour buy limit windows. Almost nobody gets six. The window on an item starts at your first purchase of it and resets fully four hours later, so to use two windows in a row on the same item you have to be there when the second one opens.
Work out your own figure honestly. If you play two sessions a day, an hour each, you realistically start one fresh window per item per session, and the second session only counts if it is more than four hours after the first. That is two windows a day, not six, and everything in this lesson scales with that number rather than with the clock.
It also explains why two flippers with identical skill get very different results. One logs in at the same two times every day and gets two clean windows; the other plays a single four hour block and gets one, plus a lot of waiting. Spacing your sessions apart is free growth, and it costs no extra playtime at all.
Why the rate falls as the bank grows
Buy limits are per item, not per bank
A limit caps how many units you may buy in a rolling four hour window. At 10M, one full limit of a cheap high volume item can be most of your bank, so your best item is available to all of your gold. At 80M, that same limit absorbs a fraction of it, and the rest has to go somewhere less good. Growth forces you down your own list of ideas.
Eight slots do not grow
A 10M bank across five slots averages 2M a position. An 80M bank across eight averages 10M. The set of items where 10M can be bought inside one window and sold inside a day is far smaller than the set where 2M can, so bigger banks are pushed towards slower items whether they like it or not.
Liquidity charges you more the larger you are
Buying 2M of an item usually fills at the price you saw. Buying 10M of the same item can take you up the ladder, and selling it back walks you down. The gap you measured shrinks as your size grows, which is a real cost that never appears as a loss anywhere, it just shows up as a smaller margin.
Your attention does not scale
Eight positions on a 10M bank take about the same time to manage as eight positions on a 100M bank, but the larger ones are slower and need more monitoring per flip. Sessions get longer for the same number of decisions.
A stepped path with real numbers
A single flat rate is the wrong model. A stepped one is closer to how it actually goes.
One plausible middle path. Roughly four months of consistent daily trading.
Now bracket it. Run the same three stages at 5%, 3.5% and 2% and the total is 74 days, around two and a half months. Run them at 1.5%, 1% and 0.6% and the total is 248 days, around eight months.
So the honest answer to "how long does 10M to 100M take" is somewhere between two and a half and eight months of consistent trading, and where you land inside that range depends on how many days you actually play, how disciplined your slot usage is, and how well you avoid the two leaks below. Anyone quoting a single number is guessing.
Days played, not days elapsed. Every figure here assumes you trade that day. Three sessions a week roughly doubles every timeline above, and a bank that sits in an unfilled offer for a weekend compounds at zero for two days.
What a bad week costs in days
Losses are more expensive than the same sized gains are valuable, because recovering a fall requires a bigger rise than the fall itself.
Lose 20% of the bank and you need a 25% gain to get back to level. At 2% a day, that is about 11 days of work to end up exactly where you started. Lose 40% and you need 67% back, which is roughly 26 days at the same rate.
Compare that with the upside of the trade that caused it. Almost nothing you can do in a single position earns 11 days of compounding, which is the whole case for the position sizing in lesson 5 and the loss rules in lesson 4. Protecting the compounding is worth more than any individual flip.
The two leaks that stop compounding entirely
Spending the profit
Compounding requires reinvestment. A bank that grows 2% a day and gets 5M drawn out of it every week for gear is not compounding, it is paying a salary. That may be exactly what you want, and it is worth being clear that it is a choice, because the difference over three months is enormous.
Idle gold
Your rate applies to committed gold. If 60% of the bank is deployed and 40% sits in the coin pouch, your effective rate is 60% of what you measured. Growing from 10M to 100M while leaving four slots empty is the same as growing at half the rate, which on the table above is the difference between four months and eight.
Where the ceiling is
At some size the limits stop being an annoyance and become the whole problem. Eight slots and a set of per item ceilings means there is a maximum amount of gold a normal flipping book can hold at once, and past that point extra gold has to sit idle, move into slower and larger items, or go into positions held for weeks rather than hours.
That is why lesson 7 exists, and it is why the high value end of the market behaves differently. A Dragon claws limit of 8 per four hours is over 300M of capacity in a single slot, which is useless at 20M and structural at 400M.
You can estimate your own ceiling in a minute. List the eight items you would actually be willing to hold today, multiply each buy limit by its price, and add them up. That total is roughly the most gold your current item list can absorb in one window. If it comes to 60M and your bank is 45M, you are close to the point where growth starts costing you rate, and the fix is a longer list rather than a bigger position in the same items.
You do not have to do that multiplication yourself. The Margins board already carries buy limit and price on every row, and Profit@Limit is the after-tax margin multiplied by the limit, which is the per-window capacity figure this calculation is reaching for. Sort by it high to low, filter Trades an hour so nothing thin sneaks in, and the top of the board is the answer to how much gold your current list can absorb. Save the arrangement as a view and re-check it monthly, because the answer changes as your bank does.
The rate the whole table above depends on has to be measured, not assumed, and there is only one honest source for it. Track what you place and My Flips files completed flips into your history with the after-tax profit worked out, so your real growth rate is a number you can read rather than one you picked because it made the arithmetic pleasant. The idle-gold leak shows up there too: positions sort into named portfolios, each carrying its own deployed capital, and a deployed figure well below your bank is the 60% problem in this section made visible.
The practical advice is simply to expect the transition rather than be surprised by it. Somewhere in the high tens of millions your item list should start changing on its own, and if it has not, your rate is about to fall for reasons you will not be able to see. The Margins board is the fastest way to find where the larger positions currently are, and the Flip Finder stays useful at every size because it is filtered to what your bank can actually afford.
Item pages used above
Live prices, volume and buy limits for the item in this lesson: Dragon claws. For contrast at the small end, Nature rune.
GE Uncut is an unofficial, fan-made tool, not affiliated with or endorsed by Jagex Limited. RuneScape and Old School RuneScape are trademarks of Jagex Limited; in-game content and item images are the property of Jagex Limited, used for reference only. Price data is from the OSRS Wiki real-time prices API. See data attribution.