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CryptoHu is #2 on Breakout’s all-time leaderboard with $600,000 in payouts.
He also has a nine-to-five day job and trades around it.
Oh – and he plays a ton of poker. That’s about to be really important, so: pay attention.
When we asked how he thinks about evaluations, he didn’t talk about confidence or discipline first. He led with math:
“If you pass the trading test, fail the funding, you get zero. If you fail the trading test, you get zero too. The only way you can get a payout is to make two winning trades…
I can lose five evaluations, but as long as I have one winning trade [on a funded account], I can get the payout.”
How does he figure that? Let’s break it down:
Most traders treat the fee as a cost. That’s where Hu differs. He treats it as position size. Here’s his version with today’s numbers:
The setup: $100K 1-Step Turbo
- Cost: $330
- Profit target: 9%, or $9,000
- Max drawdown: 3% static, or $3,000
- Split: 80%
- Payout on hitting target: $7,200
As an avid poker player, Hu treats prop trading like making systemic bets, similar to a poker game:
“My true win rate is typically around 30%, but the return, the R, is maybe over 5R per trade. So that means, like every five trades, as long as I win one, I can break even.
I risk $3,000 to target $9,000, so that’s how I pass the trading test for a $100K Turbo: I just need a 3R to pass. If I do the same when I have a funded account, that means I can get a payout around $9K, and after an 80/20 split, that will be around $7,000 in payouts.
So if I want to get a $7K payout, I need to successfully have two 3R trades. And each trade, I can risk $3K to win $9K.”
Six $100K evaluations cost him $1,980. If one of those evaluations reaches a funded payout of $7,000, he figures he can net $5,020, and the five evaluations he failed to get there will be more than paid for.
He’s also not bothered by those five failures; he views them as part of the game, and building his discipline.
“Losing trades is part of winning trades. If you don’t lose, you cannot win. This is the trade I want to take, and if I fail? That’s fine. Let’s go to the next one.”
Hu’s method is, by his own admission, risky. On a Turbo eval, $3,000 is his entire max drawdown, so risking it in one trade doesn’t just dent an account: it ends it. It’s why he buys several.
His strategy also relies on being able to take profit every time he has it, something made possible by Breakout’s on-demand payouts and lack of consistency rules or minimum trading days. Hu’s strategy wouldn’t be possible to execute successfully if that weren’t the case.
But most importantly, Hu’s the first to admit that his strategy only works if he can achieve a high enough win rate: one his own stats must support for any of this to pay off. So it’s not just his math that makes this work for him, it’s his edge. He spent years finding it through study, practice, and determination.
Five takeaways from CryptoHu that stand out
1. He gave trading a long time before it worked.
“I wasn’t a profitable trader for four or five years, because I tried a lot of things. I watched a ton of YouTube, talked to a lot of people to find what worked for me. It took time, experience, and tries.”
2. He knows his numbers, and his conditions.
“For now, I just trade Bitcoin, Ethereum. My strategy works best in a ranging market, not a trending market… [and] for me, it’s more like a 25% win rate. Sometimes I view a chart and I don’t see my edge. But every time I’m on the top leaderboard that month, if you go back to see the market, you’ll see it was a ranging market at that time.”
3. He builds constraints instead of relying on willpower.
Hu journals every single trade he makes publicly, which encourages him to stop, think, and remove potentially reckless or poor trades before taking them.
“I don’t want to do some stupid trade, because when I think about how I need to post it online, it won’t be good. So if that’s the case, I just don’t take the trade.”
4. He enjoys the discipline prop forces you to have.
“Before the prop trading, I probably had a risk management issue. That’s my biggest issue on my trading style: I had a low win rate with big returns, but I risked too much on one trade.
But when I switched to prop firm trading, the downside is capped. The downside is the trading test fee you pay, and this is the most you can lose.
If I’m right, I have a tight stop loss with a big return, then I can win a lot. If I can cap my downside risk and there’s unlimited upside, I take that risk 100% of the time.”
5. He judges the process, not the account.
“Don’t judge breaching as your failure. Just treat it as part of the game. You have to deal with what you can control.
You think this is the A+ setup; you think the win rate will be 75%, 80% for this setup, but it doesn’t work out. What can you do? You just accept it and try the next time.
Sometimes when I play poker, you can make a good decision but you lose… as long as your decision, you think, is correct, what happened next is not in your control.
I’m not saying I’m a top tier trader; I would say I’m not. I still keep learning from a lot of people. Just keep going. Especially don’t give up on yourself.”
Ready to see if your edge holds up? Start a new evaluation.
