I just had The Big Short on in the background, and something about the ISDA scene has always bugged me. I think I just figured out what.

Around the 1:00 mark, as they make their pitch to get an ISDA, Charlie explains that they’re “doing 30 million right now, but [they] started four years ago with a hundred and ten thousand.” The JP Morgan Chase peon explains that they’re $1.47 billion under the requirement for an ISDA, but to “keep up those returns and give us a call way down the road.” We, along with Jamie and Charlie, cringe with embarrassment.

Here’s the thing though: if they do keep up the same returns they’ve had in the past four years, they’re already more than halfway to that ISDA minimum.

The compound annual growth rate to have gotten from $110,000 to $30,000,000 in four years is 306.4%. That is, they’re quadrupling their money each year, and then some.

That means that a year from when that meeting takes place, Brownfield would have grown from $30 million to $122 million.

A year later it would have grown to $495 million.

If they kept going, they’d hit the $1.5 billion minimum for the ISDA just two years, nine months, and fifteen days from the time of that meeting.

I get that sustaining 306.4% returns for almost seven years is a stretch, but someone working on “Ted’s desk” at JPMC should be able to do enough quick math to determine that growth rate and not brush these guys off as being “way down the road”. Even a movie version of someone who probably never existed.

OK, I feel better now.