The pitch shows up everywhere: put a small amount on a crypto future, use enough leverage, take +10% and stop for the day. Ten percent of a small account is a small number, so it sounds modest. Leverage is supposed to do the rest.
We wanted a straight answer, so we simulated it. Every day, the same margin goes in, and the day ends at +10%, at the stop, at liquidation, or at midnight. We tried four ways of picking a direction, five leverage levels and four stop sizes, on almost three years of BTC, ETH and SOL data.
The answer is no, and the way it fails is worth understanding, because it's the same trap at every leverage level.
How the test worked
| Markets | BTC, ETH and SOL perpetual futures, 1-hour candles |
| Main period | 1 Jan 2024 to 7 Nov 2026 (1,042 days) |
| Check period | 2020 to 2023, to see whether anything held up on other years |
| Each day | €100 of margin, isolated. Close at +10% net, at the stop, at liquidation or at the end of the day |
| Direction rules | Trend of the day, first-hour breakout, fade a 2×ATR move, and a coin flip as the control |
| Leverage | x5, x10, x20, x50, x100 |
| Stop | 10%, 25%, 50% or 100% of the margin |
| Costs | 0.05% taker fee per side on the full position, 0.01% slippage, funding of 0.01% every 8 hours charged every time |
| Liquidation | When the price moves 1/leverage minus 0.5% against you |
That's 3 markets × 4 rules × 5 leverage levels × 4 stops = 240 setups. When the stop and the +10% target both fell inside the same candle, we counted the stop first.
What happened
6 of the 240 setups made money on average. All six were the "trend of the day" rule on SOL at x5 or x10. With 240 tries, a handful of winners is roughly what luck alone produces.
The best of them made €0.66 a day per €100: +0.66% a day, not 10%. On 2020 to 2023 the same rule lost €0.88 a day. It didn't hold up.
Then we ran the version people actually imagine, where the whole account goes back in every day so the gains compound. None of the 240 accounts grew. The best one ended with €8.73 out of its starting €100.
The trap: hitting the target often isn't the same as making money
This is the part worth slowing down for.
At x20 on SOL with no stop, the trend rule hit +10% on 86% of days. That sounds like a strategy that works. Then we checked the coin flip with the same settings: it also hit +10% on 86% of days.
So the 86% had nothing to do with the rule. At x20, a normal day's movement is enough to touch +10% at some point, in either direction you pick. The problem is the other 14%. Over the test period those settings were liquidated 70 to 77 times. Each liquidation wipes out the day's whole margin, and that more than cancels all the +10% days:
- trend rule: -€1,024 over the period
- coin flip: -€1,535
With compounding, the account died on day one.
The maths behind it is simple. A good day pays €10. A liquidation costs the full €100, ten times as much. Around 900 winning days were more than cancelled by seventy-odd liquidations and the days that closed at a loss.
Higher leverage makes it worse, not better
Here's what the average setup did at each leverage level over 1,042 days:
| Leverage | Average result per day, per €100 | Days that hit +10% | Liquidations in 1,042 days | Median days before a compounding account is wiped out |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| x5 | -€0.72 | 32% | 0.3 | 295 |
| x10 | -€1.45 | 46% | 2.5 | 141 |
| x20 | -€2.81 | 50% | 13.8 | 81 |
| x50 | -€8.49 | 40% | 39.9 | 38 |
| x100 | -€20.79 | 22% | 107.4 | 18 |
Three things drive those numbers:
- Fees are charged on the full position, not your margin. At x50, a round trip costs about 5% of your margin in fees. Half your target is gone before the price moves.
- Liquidation comes very close. At x50, a move of about 1.5% against you closes the position. Crypto moves 3 to 5% on an ordinary day.
- The upside is capped and the downside isn't. You stop at +10%. A loss can be the whole margin.
You can see the second point for any position with the crypto liquidation calculator.
What about x100 and a bigger target?
We also tested the version where €100 at x100 is meant to make €50 a day. Because one-hour candles can hide what happens inside the hour, we re-ran it on 1-minute data.
- 0 of 54 setups made money. The best lost €9.07 a day, which adds up to -€9,444 over the period.
- Without a stop, the position was liquidated on 53 to 61% of days.
- Days that reached +€50 happened 13 to 47% of the time, about the same as a coin flip.
One setup looked profitable on hourly data with optimistic fill assumptions (+€5.75 a day). On 1-minute data it lost €9.96 a day. The hourly result came from not seeing the path inside each candle. That's a useful warning if you backtest leveraged strategies on large timeframes.
The arithmetic at x100: liquidation comes about 0.5% away, and the target needs about +0.6% after fees. That's close to a 45/55 race against you. A win pays €50 and a loss costs €100, so you'd need to win about two times out of three just to break even.
What we'd take from this
- A fixed daily target doesn't fit with leverage. The market doesn't care about your target. Forcing a trade every day until you hit it piles up exactly the losing days that liquidate you.
- Judge a leveraged strategy by its worst days, not its hit rate. A strategy that wins 86% of its days can be a disaster. Count liquidations, and compare the result with a coin flip on the same settings.
- Size by risk, not by target. Decide what you can lose on a trade first, then work out the position. Our guide to position sizing and the 1% rule goes through how.
- Test on fine data. Leveraged results on hourly or daily candles can be fiction. Check them on 1-minute data before you believe them.
If a +10%-a-day strategy existed and held up, it would compound €100 into more money than exists within a year. That alone tells you something about the claims you see in ads.
We ran a similar test on frequent trading without leverage: 2,160 crypto scalping strategies against retail fees. It ends in the same place: costs and losing days decide the result, not the hit rate.
This article describes historical simulations for educational purposes. It isn't investment advice, and simulated results don't predict future returns. Leveraged trading can lose your whole stake quickly. If you trade, test on a demo account first and only risk money you can afford to lose.