Interview noteThis page restates a public interview in new words. Dollar results, win rates, and payouts are claims made by the speaker or the host. They are not this desk's record, and they are not a result to expect.
The firm sits four traders down and asks each the same question: what is the best way to pass a challenge. The host says the four have collectively withdrawn over $10 million from prop firms. The caption's names are uneven, so the people below are Matthias, a scalper with hundreds of thousands in payouts; Robert, a former hedge fund manager the host credits with $150 million of assets under management and $1 million in payouts, whose surname the caption renders both as Lothar and as Rother; Henrik Thomas, 19, making $30,000 a month in payouts; and the firm's founder, rendered as Kristjan Radaker and also as Kristoff, a four-time top-five finisher in the World Championship of Trading. The live numbers are what they say on the recording.
Matthias: one trend trade, copied
On the US opening five-minute chart of micro Nasdaq, Matthias had been long all day, from midnight, above VWAP. His method for the challenge is a fixed 2 to 1 and a win rate over 50 percent. He was targeting the high, about 100 points up toward 29,800, and he scaled in. Take-gain on the account he was showing was about $600, stop about $300. The path into it was a deep correction into a small range where candles kept popping back up, then a pullback in what he calls the rest session, then the expansion.
Bookmap is the tool he had already shown in an earlier interview. Price had dropped to 29,670. He waited for a further dip and got long in that range, around 15:30 German time. The trend was long and the liquidity was long, so he thought the odds of taking out the day's high were better than the odds of a drop. Confirmation was liquidity at 29,750: large green bubbles, market buyers. He would have been willing to see 29,800 as well, as a psychological level with liquidity. With about $300 of open gain he moved the stop to slightly better than break-even. Ten copied accounts, each at the $600 target, is the $6,000 he and the host put on the trade, in about 50 seconds. Then the day is over. Four or five minutes of work, one trade, the same idea across the accounts. Order flow on Bookmap, basic price action, and a positive payoff he will not give up.
Robert: VWAP, the book, and almost no trades
Robert's one-sentence niche is detecting when algorithms are going to buy and sell. The screen is Bookmap. Green and blue lines on the right are buy limits resting in the market. Red lines are sell limits. He wants to know where people want to transact, because price tends to travel toward liquidity. A large order in an empty area moves the price to a level that is unfair to the person who has to fill it. A buy needs a seller. Without one, price runs.
The trade itself is a VWAP reaction, and he states both sides. If the market comes up to VWAP from below, he shorts exactly at VWAP and accepts the stop when it fails. If the market has gone above VWAP and is coming back to it, he goes long. On the ES prop accounts he was trading, the take-gain is 11 ticks and the stop is 10 ticks. He uses 50K accounts because, in this case, he thinks they have the best reward against the risk. One or two contracts. One or two trades, and the day is finished. He rejects the idea that a scalper owes the market a hundred trades. His win rate at the time of the conversation was about 75 to 80 percent, behind what he describes as more than 30 years of institutional trading, reduced to the minimum. TradingView is the longer-term picture. Bookmap is the execution. On the tape he shows, price touches VWAP, sell orders arrive, he is already out. A second approach to VWAP, with the market rotating around it, is his confirmation that the level is where size is changing hands.
The input he says most traders never consider is the volatility index. Above 20, and further above that, the same strategy starts losing because the book changes. Moves are larger, liquidity is thinner, and sweeps are stronger. His example is a 10-point drop that comes back 10 points, then another 10. A 10-tick stop might become 15 or 20 ticks, and the take-gain widens with it. The strategy does not change. The distances do. That adjustment is where he says 99 percent of traders fail, often because they do not know what the volatility reading is doing to the book. If the work starts to feel exciting, he treats that as a sign something is wrong. Boring is the successful version.
Henrik: the second test of a value area
Henrik's pass method is the one he has the patience for, and he calls it intraday swing trading. On the S&P 500 he draws business zones, which are value-area highs and lows from the market profile. He says a trader does not even have to understand the profile logic to mark the level. In the example, the prior day had two of those zones. The market opened at 5:30, went bearish, consolidated below a zone, reversed, pushed briefly above it, and did not find acceptance. That is where he gets interested. Price is at the zone, it is showing bullish intent, and it has not followed through.
Cumulative delta for the day showed buyers getting more aggressive as the session went on, enough bullish pressure that a long made sense to him. The entry is not the first trip above the zone. Price goes above, comes back under, and the second time it goes above is the trade. On the one-minute chart that second push was a breakout through equal highs, cleaner than on the five-minute. He is following the broader move, and the target is the next business zone. The trade has to be allowed to run, which is why he does not like it on most of his other accounts. An evaluation has the time. Funded accounts and his own capital he would rather not tie up in the hold. Risk size, he says, is the trader's choice. The host's summary is a test of the zone, a rejection, confirmation on the second move, and a hold from one zone to the next, with something like bullish delta as the supporting read.
The founder: gap, relative strength, and a short day
The founder's pass process starts before the open. He wants to know whether volatility is contracting or whether momentum is actually there, whether he has relative certainty about structure, what the underlying volatility is, and which news is coming. Preparation is the key. He does not sit down and press a button. He trades US regular hours only. He is based in Europe, and a rule he learned is that too many hours in front of the screen destroys the performance he is trying to keep. One or two good trades. Two or three setups he actually likes.
The first is gap and go. If the overnight session has left more buyers, and a gap is sitting between sessions, the question is continuation versus consolidation. He trades with the flow of that money, not toward filling the gap, and especially when momentum is already in the gap's direction. The first one or two minutes are too volatile to trust. After a few minutes, a breakout in the direction of the gap is the bet. He also wants to know when the alternative, a gap fill, is the more likely path. The second setup is relative strength inside the US index complex: S&P, Nasdaq, Dow, and Russell. Long the strongest, short the weakest. Betting against all-time highs, as a day trader, he calls tricky and often senseless. Into the reversal that had just printed, he had preferred for recent weeks to be long the Dow rather than long the Nasdaq. He describes both ideas as simple on purpose.
The host's closing inventory is that the four are mostly simple, that the work is an edge plus the same risk rules applied without improvising, and that what showed up on the screens was order flow, basic price action, and market structure, aimed at breakouts or trend-following. He did not see MACD, RSI, or Fibonacci. All four were day trading or scalping. The combined $10 million is his figure for their withdrawals, not a result from the afternoon on camera. The result from the afternoon is Matthias's $6,000 across ten accounts, Robert's tick scalp at VWAP, and two descriptions of how a pass can be one or two trades instead of a day of activity.