🏷️#Leverage
2 articles
Don't Smooth Out Your Equity Curve in Prop Trading: Why It's the Exact Opposite of Normal Portfolio Management
In investing, conventional wisdom says to suppress volatility. But in prop firm challenges, this flips completely — payouts are decided by a threshold ('did you hit +8% or not'), and downside is capped at the fee. A smoothed-out account never hits the wall, but it also never reaches the target — it just pays the fee and goes nowhere. Testing by scaling lot size on real intraday-anomaly strategies, we found the location of the 'cliff' — where too much lot size backfires — varies more than 3x between strategies: one strategy fell off the cliff and stayed negative past 2.5x, while another kept climbing all the way to 8x.
Mindless Prop Firm Spam vs. a Serious Own-Capital Trader: We Tested Which Wins With the Same Cash, Using Real Data
Which makes more money: putting the same $10,000 entirely into challenge fees and running 20 unrelated accounts, or trading it as your own capital? Using 40 strategies built from real prices from 2010 to 2026, we ran the same market data and same strategies through 3,000 simulations each. The result: expected assets after one year of $20,356 vs. $10,157 — a clear win for prop. And the own-capital side still can't catch up even at 60x leverage, because it goes bust first. Matching prop required an annualized Sharpe ratio of 1.46. But once capital reaches $1,000,000, the gap almost disappears.