Tools

Waiting Out a Redemption Gate

A fund that caps how much of a holding it redeems in one dealing period has turned a liquidity promise into a queue. If everyone asks at once, how many dealing periods and how many days pass before the share you would count as out has come back?

A factsheet tells you how often a fund deals. It does not tell you how much it will deal. Where a fund caps the share of a holding it will redeem in one dealing period, what comes back each period is a share of what is left — so the queue stretches, and the last fraction of a holding never comes back at all. This page takes your own gate and calendar and says two things: how long until the share you would count as out has arrived, and what is still in the fund when it does.

What this tool does not decide

Whether a gate will be used. A gate is a power most funds that hold it have never exercised. Entering one asks what would happen if it were, and this page has no probability in it, no redemption rate and no field that could carry either.
Whether to hold the thing. A long wait is not a reason to sell and a short one is not a reason to buy. A fund that gates is doing to every holder at once what selling into a falling market would do to one of them, and that trade-off is the reason the mechanism exists.
What your fund’s terms are. This page publishes no gate, no notice period and no dealing frequency, names no fund or manager, fetches nothing, and has no field to name one with. They are in the prospectus and the fund rules, and that is why nothing on this page can go out of date.
What the holding is worth. Every figure here is a share of what you held when you asked. What it is worth while you wait, and what it is worth when it arrives, are not questions a gate and a calendar can reach.
Anything about tax, in any jurisdiction.

Your figures

The interactive calculation runs in your browser and needs local JavaScript, which is currently switched off. Activating the Calculate button does nothing at all: no request is sent and nothing is submitted.

Everything else on this page works without it. The model, the formulas, the timing convention, the worked example, the assumptions and the limitations are all in the methodology below, and the companion explainer covers the mechanism in full.

Your fund’s terms, in five numbers

The gate, the calendar and what you would count as out are yours to enter, and this page publishes none of them. Gates are a power a fund holds rather than a rate anybody publishes; most funds that hold the power have never used it, and the terms are in the prospectus and the fund rules rather than on the factsheet. Take them from the documents for the fund you are actually in. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, and there is no field here for a fund, a manager or an amount.

The share of a holding the gate lets out in one dealing period

The cap the fund may apply when redemptions exceed what it can meet — 10 for a tenth. It applies to what is left of your holding each period rather than to what you started with, which is what makes the queue stretch. Enter 0 if dealing is suspended and 100 if there is no gate at all; both are answers this page gives rather than errors it refuses.

How many days one dealing period lasts

1 for daily dealing, 30 for monthly, 90 for quarterly. This is the figure the factsheet publishes, and on its own it tells you almost nothing about the wait — the two fields above decide that.

Days of notice before the first dealing period counts

How long the fund requires between your instruction and the first dealing point it can act on. Enter 0 if none is required. It does not change how many dealing periods the queue takes; it changes when the first of them lands, and this page reports the two separately for that reason.

Days between a dealing period and the money arriving

The settlement cycle for a redemption, counted once at the end rather than after every period. Enter 0 if the money arrives on the dealing day itself.

Result

A dealing frequency is a promise about how often a fund will trade with you. It is not a promise about how much it will trade. Where a fund holds things slower to sell than its dealing frequency implies, it manages the mismatch with a notice period, with a cap on the share of a holding it will redeem in one dealing period, or by suspending dealing altogether — and each of those turns a liquidity promise into a queue. Your wait is then a function of the cap and not of the frequency on the factsheet. A monthly-dealing fund with a tenth-of-a-holding cap returns ninety per cent of what you hold in twenty-two dealing periods, and a monthly-dealing fund with a fiftieth returns it in a hundred and fourteen.

Under a proportional gate the last fraction of a holding never comes back at all. That is not a rounding artefact and it is not a defect of the arithmetic — it is what a proportional cap is: each dealing period returns a share of what is left, and a share of something is never all of it. This is why this page asks you what share you would count as having got your money, and why it publishes no suggested figure. A wait to ninety per cent and a wait to ninety-nine per cent are not the same question, and at a tenth-of-a-holding cap the second takes exactly twice as long as the first.

Enter your five figures above and select Calculate. Nothing is sent anywhere: the calculation runs in this browser, and no value is stored, shared or placed in the address bar.

The share of your holding this wait is to: Not yet calculated
Dealing periods before that share has come back: Not yet calculated
The wait in days, once notice and settlement are counted: Not yet calculated
The same wait in years, at 365 days to the year: Not yet calculated
How far into the last dealing period the target actually lands: Not yet calculated
Days of that wait that are notice alone, before any dealing period counts: Not yet calculated
What the first dealing period returns: Not yet calculated
The share returned by the end of the schedule below: Not yet calculated
What is still in the fund at the end of it: Not yet calculated

Every share here is a share of the holding you had when you asked, and every wait is in days from the day you asked. There is no amount and no currency anywhere in this arithmetic, because the answer does not depend on the size of your holding: a proportional gate returns the same fraction of a large position and a small one. That also means nothing here is a value. What your holding is worth while you wait, and what it is worth when it arrives, are not questions this page can reach.

This is the worst case, and the worst case is what makes it publishable. The Decision Job it answers is “if everyone asks at once, when do I get mine” — and under a proportional gate that condition returns the same share of every holding, which makes the wait a deterministic function of the cap alone rather than a forecast of what other holders will do. There is no probability here, no redemption rate and no scenario weighting, and no field that could be mistaken for one. It also assumes the cap stays where you put it for every period, which a discretionary gate need not: a manager who tightens one mid-queue makes every figure on this page an underestimate.

A long wait is not a reason to sell and a short one is not a reason to buy. A gate is a power most funds that hold it have never exercised, so entering one is a question about what could happen rather than a claim that it has; and a fund that gates is doing to every holder at once what selling into a falling market would do to one of them, which is the trade-off the mechanism exists for. What is published here is the arithmetic of the queue you would be in. Whether the thing at the end of it is worth being in is not a question a gate and a calendar can answer.

How this is worked out

Why a dealing frequency is not a waiting time

A factsheet says how often a fund will trade with you. It does not say how much it will trade. Where a fund holds things that are slower to sell than its dealing frequency implies — property, private credit, infrastructure, small companies, anything with a real buyer at the other end — the mismatch is managed with a notice period, with a cap on the share of a holding it will redeem in one dealing period, or by suspending dealing altogether.Each of those turns a liquidity promise into a queue, and your wait is then a function of the cap rather than of the frequency you were shown.

Two things that empty over time, and one difference between them that everything else follows from: whether what comes out each period is a share of what there was or a share of what is left.
What is emptying	Each period	If you halve the rate	How it ends
A reserve you are drawing on	A fixed amount comes out each month	Halve the amount and the runway doubles	It reaches zero, on a date you can name
A holding behind a proportional gate	A fixed share of what is left comes back each period	Halve the cap and the wait roughly doubles at small caps and does something else at large ones	It never reaches zero. The last fraction does not come back at all

The arithmetic

Write g for the cap, n for a number of dealing periods andx for the share you would count as out. A cap of g returns a shareg of whatever is left, so what is left after n periods is(1 − g) multiplied by itself n times, and the question this page answers inverts that:

remaining(n) = (1 − g)ⁿ            returned(n) = 1 − (1 − g)ⁿ

periods to a share x = ceil( ln(1 − x) ÷ ln(1 − g) )

days = notice + periods × dealing period + settlement

The rounding up is not a convenience. A gate acts at a dealing point, so the share arrives in steps and you are either past your target at the end of a period or you are not — the unrounded figure is published beside it so you can see how far into the last period the target actually lands.Note where n is. It is an exponent, so the wait responds to the cap logarithmically, which is why the three lines below are not evenly spaced and why nobody guesses them.

What the cap does to the wait

A cap of half a holding: Four dealing periods to ninety per cent
A cap of a tenth: Twenty-two dealing periods to ninety per cent
A cap of a fiftieth: A hundred and fourteen dealing periods to ninety per cent

A fivefold cut in the cap multiplies the wait by five and a half, and a further fivefold cut multiplies it by five again. Every one of those three is the same monthly-dealing fund.

The three states, and why neither end is an error

A cap of zero is a suspension: nothing is redeemed in any period, and this page reports a stop rather than a very large number, because a wait can be planned around and a suspension cannot. A cap of the whole holding is an ungated fund: everything comes back in the first dealing period, and it is the only case in which asking for a hundred per cent of your holding ever gets an answer. Everything between is gated, and there the share comes back quickly at first, flattens, and never finishes.

Notice is not a dealing period, and that is the point

The wait in dealing periods and the wait in days are published separately, and they differ by the notice period.A daily-dealing fund with ninety days’ notice is not a daily-dealing fund to somebody who wants their money, and the notice row in the result is the size of that gap. It is counted once, at the start, rather than before every period.

What you enter, and what this page will never enter for you

A cap, a dealing period, a notice period, a settlement period and the share you would count as out. This page publishes none of them and names no fund. A gate is a power a fund holds rather than a rate anybody publishes; the terms are in the prospectus and the fund rules rather than on the factsheet, and most funds that hold the power have never used it. Because this page holds no such fact, there is nothing on it that can go out of date — and entering a cap is a question about what could happen rather than a claim that it has.

The limits this calculation imposes on itself

Everything here assumes every holder asks at once. That is the Decision Job’s own framing rather than a scenario chosen from several: under a proportional gate that condition returns the same share of every holding, which is what makes the wait a deterministic function of the cap instead of a forecast of what other holders do.
The cap is held constant for every dealing period. A discretionary gate need not be, and a manager who tightens one mid-queue makes every figure on this page an underestimate of the wait.
The queue is proportional to holdings. A first-come first-served queue, a queue pro-rata over requests rather than holdings, and a discretionary allocation are three different mechanisms, and none of them is this one with a different cap.
The wait in days counts the notice once and settlement once, around a whole number of dealing periods. No dealing calendar, holiday or leap year is modelled, and the years figure is a straight division by 365 rather than a date.
Nothing here is about value. A holder who waits two years holds something whose price moved while they waited, and this page has no view on what it moved to.

What is not modelled

any queue that is not proportional — first-come first-served, pro-rata over requests rather than holdings, and discretionary allocation are three different mechanisms, and none of them is this one with a different cap
a cap that changes from one dealing period to the next, which a discretionary gate is entitled to do
the value of the holding, and what it does while you wait for it
any charge for redeeming, including a swing price, a dilution levy or an exit fee
a partial suspension that applies to some share classes and not others
what a fund does with the assets it sells to meet the queue, and in what order
the identity of any fund, manager, administrator, depositary or regulator
tax, in any jurisdiction

The mechanism underneath all of this — that what a holding is worth and what you can reach are different facts — is taught in the explainer:liquidity is not the same as net worth.

Go deeper

The nearest published mechanism
Why Liquidity Is Not the Same as Net Worth
Why an asset can add to your net worth and still be no help in an emergency, what access time and sale friction actually cost, why a usable share is your assumption rather than a valuation, and why holding more cash has a price of its own.
Nothing on this page disputes what the holding is worth. The whole of the wait happens at an undisputed valuation, which is the gap between value and availability the explainer is about.
Read the explainer: Why Liquidity Is Not the Same as Net Worth

Calculation model and corrections

Calculation model: Redemption Queue v1.0
Last reviewed: 27 August 2026
What the cap applies to: The share of what is *left* that one dealing period returns, not a share of the original holding. That is what makes the queue geometric: the same cap returns less every period, because there is less to take it from
Why the whole holding never comes back: What remains after n periods is (1 − cap) to the power n, which is positive for every finite n at any cap short of the whole. The last fraction never arrives, which is why this page asks what share you would count as out and publishes no suggested figure
The worst case, fixed rather than asked for: Everything here assumes every holder asks at once, which is the Decision Job’s own framing. Under a proportional gate that condition returns the same share of every holding, which makes the wait a function of the cap alone. There is no probability, redemption rate or scenario weighting anywhere on this page and no field that could carry one
Periods and days are separate figures: The wait in dealing periods counts dealing points. The wait in days counts the notice once, the periods, and settlement once. The difference between them is the notice, and that is precisely the quantity a factsheet’s dealing frequency leaves out
A cap of zero and a cap of the whole holding: Both are states rather than errors. Zero is a suspension — a stop rather than a long queue, reported as no wait rather than as a very large number. The whole holding is an ungated fund, and it is the only case in which a target of one hundred per cent is ever reached
The schedule length: Derived rather than asked for, to one rule: it runs two dealing periods past the period your answer lands in, with a floor of twelve, a ceiling of two hundred and forty, and a cut-off where a schedule would otherwise run more than a century from the request
A remaining share printed in words: A share still in the fund that is positive but smaller than the display precision is printed as words rather than as 0.00%. Printing it as a number would put “all of it is back” beside “none of it is left” in the same row, and the second is the true one
The unit: There is none, and the answer does not depend on one. Every figure is a share of the holding you had when you asked and a number of days from the day you asked. A proportional gate returns the same fraction of a large position and a small one
Years, where they are shown: A straight division of the days by 365. It is a reading aid for a long wait rather than a calendar date, and no leap year, dealing calendar or holiday is modelled anywhere on this page
The gate and the calendar: Yours. This page publishes neither, names no fund and has nowhere to put one. It therefore holds nothing that can go out of date
Excluded: Any queue that is not proportional, a cap that changes mid-queue, the value of the holding, every charge for redeeming, and what the fund sells to meet the queue
Rounding: Display only; intermediate values remain unrounded

Correction history

The first draft of the model’s invariants claimed the cumulative share returned is strictly increasing. The verifier swept the schedule and returned ninety violations. The cause is that the cumulative share is computed as one minus what remains, and once what remains falls below the resolution of a double that subtraction saturates at exactly one while the remaining share is still positive — at a fifty per cent cap, around the fifty-fourth dealing period, the schedule holds a cumulative share of exactly one and a remaining share of about five parts in a hundred million billion in the same row. The claim was wrong and the arithmetic was right. The model now publishes both fields precisely so that nobody has to infer one from the other, and this page prints a positive remaining share in words rather than as 0.00% for the same reason.
The two ends of the cap were specified as states rather than as rejections, which is unlike every other bound in this repository. A suspension is a gate at one limit and an ungated fund is a gate at the other, and neither inverts the mechanism — a reader holding either is asking the same question. A target share of exactly one hundred per cent was admitted for the same kind of reason: refusing it would have hidden this model’s most important answer behind a validation message.