Wealth Velocity Explained: How Fast Is Your Net Worth Really Moving?
The One-Sentence Definition
Wealth velocity is the average amount your total net worth gains or loses each day, smoothed over the period you are looking at.
Wealth velocity is calculated automatically in Turbobulls, updated every time you log a transaction. See it on your dashboard →
The Intuition: The Slope, Not the Dot
Imagine writing down your total net worth every day for three months, then plotting it on a chart. Some days it dips, some days it spikes. Velocity is the slope of the line that best fits those dots.
Person A: +$80/day
Average wealth growth of 80 a day. Some days were better, some worse, but the line points up. Over a year that adds up to about 29,000 of accumulated wealth.Person B: -$20/day
On average, losing 20 a day. The trend line points down. Even if individual months look fine, the cumulative drift is negative - about 7,300 lost per year if the pace holds.Velocity does not care about any single day. It cares about the direction and speed of the overall trend.
What the Net Worth Badge Means
Inside Turbobulls, every metric carries a small scope badge that tells you what data feeds it. Wealth velocity carries the Net worth badge.
That means it looks at your entire wealth picture:
- Wallet cash (all your tracked cash accounts)
- Portfolio market value (open positions at fair value)
- Broker cash (uninvested cash sitting at brokers)
- Minus debt (loans, credit cards, anything you owe)
In other words: Net worth = Wallet + Portfolio + Broker cash - Debt. Velocity is the slope of that one combined number over time.
How to Read the Number
There is no universal "good" velocity - it depends on your income, expenses, and life stage. But here is a practical reading:
| Velocity | What it typically means |
|---|---|
| Strongly negative | Spending or losing wealth fast. Worth investigating which part of your net worth is bleeding. |
| Slightly negative | Sliding backwards. Often fixable with small spending or investing changes. |
| Near zero | Treading water. You are neither building nor losing - common when expenses match income. |
| Mildly positive | Building wealth gradually. Sustainable if the pace holds. |
| Strongly positive | Compounding fast. Verify it is from real income or gains, not just from transferring money into tracked accounts. |
The right number for you depends on your income level. Someone earning 3,000/month and saving 30% has a different "good" velocity than someone earning 30,000/month.
Track Your Wealth Trajectory in Real Time
The Catch: It Cannot Tell Earned from Transferred
This is the most important caveat. Velocity measures the slope of your tracked net worth - it cannot distinguish between:
- Wealth you generated (income, dividends, gains on investments)
- Wealth you moved in (transferring money from an untracked external account into a tracked one)
If you receive a 10,000 inheritance into your tracked bank account, your velocity will jump even though no new wealth was created from work or investing. Turbobulls treats the deposit as net worth growth because, from the dashboard's point of view, that money just appeared.
How Turbobulls Calculates Wealth Velocity
In plain words: Turbobulls draws the best-fit line through your daily net-worth points across the period you are viewing, and reports the slope of that line.
velocity = (lastNetWorth − firstNetWorth) / totalDays (sparse data, fewer than 10 points)
velocity = slope of linear regression on (date, netWorth) (denser data, 10+ points)
Collect daily net worth points. Each sampling point in your date range contributes one (date, totalNetWorth) pair.
Pick the method. Fewer than 10 points uses the simple endpoint-to-endpoint slope. 10 or more uses ordinary least squares regression for noise resistance.
Compute the slope. The result is in project currency per day.
When Velocity Matters - and When to Ignore It
- Tracking long-term progress. Slope over months tells you the real story behind day-to-day noise.
- Comparing periods. Was velocity higher last quarter? Filter the dashboard to find out.
- Spotting drift. A slowly negative velocity is easy to miss in the balance but obvious in the slope.
- Forecasting. The yearly projection (velocity × 365) is a useful sanity check on retirement plans.
- You just made a big transfer. Spikes from external deposits are not real wealth creation.
- You only have a few days of data. Not enough points to draw a meaningful line.
- Markets are volatile. Short-term swings in portfolio value distort the slope until they smooth out.
- You're judging investing skill. Velocity mixes savings and returns. For pure investing performance, use MWR or Sharpe.
The Full Picture: Pair Velocity With These
Velocity alone tells you direction and pace. The complete wealth-trajectory picture combines several metrics:
Stop Eyeballing Your Net Worth Chart
Turbobulls turns your daily balance into a clear trajectory. Velocity, growth rate, momentum, and a dozen other metrics calculated automatically. No spreadsheets, no manual tracking.
- Automatic wealth velocity with smart regression-based smoothing
- Per-period filtering to compare different stretches of time
- Yearly projection so you can sanity-check retirement targets
- Pairs with CAGR, momentum, and Sharpe for the full picture
- Multi-currency wealth handled natively
- Zero manual calculations - log a transaction, see updated metrics
Read more
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CAGR is the equivalent annual interest rate that would have grown your starting net worth into today's. Learn how Turbobulls calculates it, what good values look like, and the trap of small starting balances.
Momentum Explained: Is Your Wealth-Building Speeding Up or Slowing Down?
Momentum measures whether your wealth velocity is accelerating or decelerating. Learn how Turbobulls calculates it, what good and bad values look like, and the trap of small baselines.