I am looking to set a profit goal for some coins. How is a 1x, 5x or 100x return calculated?
Well there are only estimations, best is to look at marketcap and what it realistically could do.
Lets say you invest in a dApp platform, the biggest would be Ethereum; which sits at an 85billion marketcap (phew thats a lot!)
Then we got another which is NEO which sits at 5 billion.
If we'd sum up all the dApp platforms together, we get a total marketcap of dApp platforms. You can try to realistically assess how much of a marketshare your dApp platform could take. Lets stick to the NEO and ETH example of 90 billion total.
Lets say they manage to take 10% then we're looking at 9 billion marketcap for your dApp platform. Divide the 9billion by the current marketcap of your dApp platform you're investing in. Lets say the current marketcap is 400 million so. 9/0,4= 22,5x
(9bln/0,4bln)
So your coin COULD go 22,5, lets say its 3 dollars then 22,5x3= 67,5 per token.
But this is mainly all guesswork really. There's no real good way to say how high it can go. Lets take NEO, a lot of quality projects are being produced but the marketcap is still relatively low compared to Ethereum, maybe thats a sign its undervalued for where its currently at? So thats a buy signal at least.
But just trying to give you an illustration of how you could assess profitability. There are other methods aswell though.
Take this all with a grain of salt though.