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25 YEARS IN BUSINESS VS. TRADING
Made 20x in Prop Trading: $99 → $2,000
Evgeny has been in business since he was 14: from running a computer club and an auto repair shop to owning 16 Wildberries pickup points. Over 25 years, he gained massive management experience, but ultimately decided to transition to trading — which turned out to be much calmer than working with people.
After blowing three challenges on Hash Hedge, he secured a $2,000 payout. Today, prop trading is his primary source of income.
Contents
1. Computer Club and 16 Wildberries Pickup Points
2. A Million-Dollar Mistake
3. The Path to Trading: From Binary Options to Wave Analysis
4. The First Trade with 100x Leverage
5. Minus $6,000 on a Single Stop
6. Transitioning to Prop Trading
7. 3 Failures on the Way to a Funded Account
8. Fourth Challenge: A $2,000 Payout
9. Tips for Beginners
10. Key Takeaways
Computer Club and 16 Wildberries Pickup Points
Evgeny's story began in a small village in Crimea.
At 14, he found himself acting as the man of the house, living with his mother and sister. Money was tight. One day, he brought home two Sony PlayStation consoles and let local kids play for a fee.
Using the money he made, the family took out a loan to buy their first computers. Soon, his home-based side hustle grew into a fully-fledged computer club with 8 gaming stations, hosting Counter-Strike and Quake tournaments.
At just 14 years old, Evgeny was earning as much in a single day as a schoolteacher made in a month.
Next came a move to Almetyevsk, where he opened a gadget repair shop, flipped cars, and launched an auto body shop.
In 2021, he entered the Wildberries pickup point franchise market, scaling his network to 16 locations and hiring 32 employees. Later, he sold the entire network at the peak of its market value.
A Million-Dollar Mistake
Evgeny considers his biggest business mistake to be losing control over finances during periods of high profitability.
"When you consistently get 1,500,000 rubles in your account every month, you lose your vigilance. You start spending money on personal needs and large-scale projects without thinking about the risk of a cash flow gap."
Riding high on his pickup point income, the entrepreneur invested heavily in renovating his home: he laid paving stones, installed an expensive snow-melting system, and built a fence.
Right at that moment, a tax audit hit. The business urgently needed a large sum of money, but there was simply no reserve fund.
Over his 25 years of entrepreneurial activity, Evgeny had never worked with partners, preferring to make all key decisions himself. Instead of partners, he hired managers and top executives, but he lacked a dedicated specialist to monitor cash flows and build reserves.
"If I had a financial officer or an accountant by my side telling me what I could spend and what to keep in reserve, the problem would have been easily resolved."
The Path to Trading: From Binary Options to Wave Analysis
Evgeny had long been looking for income sources that didn't involve managing people. He experimented with affiliate marketing, e-commerce, and advertising.
He once tried binary options. He made some initial profit, then blew his entire deposit. Trading without a system, he realized, is a dead end.
Later, while participating in a well-known crypto project involving NFT sneakers, Evgeny met an entrepreneur who had completed professional training in wave analysis.
This entrepreneur shared his knowledge with Evgeny, sparking his journey into trading.
"I used to treat trading like a guessing game. But with experience, I realized it's nothing like that."
The First Trade with 100x Leverage
Evgeny remembers his very first trade in detail. He sent $10 to a crypto exchange, opened a position with a massive 100x leverage, and went to bed without understanding market mechanics at all.
"I woke up, and there was $150 in my account. I thought, 'This is a goldmine!'"
The joy was short-lived, as he quickly lost all his profits. However, this experience proved to him that financial markets offer massive liquidity.
"Seeing numbers on a screen is one thing. But converting them into fiat is a completely different feeling. My wife couldn't believe it was possible."
In mid-2025, amid the powerful BTC rally toward $124,000, Evgeny caught the wave. In just two weeks, his deposit grew from $300 to $6,000, and a month later, his balance reached $17,000.
He withdrew the entire amount to support his business.
"It's a good thing I withdrew it. Otherwise, it would have stayed there. On October 10, 2025, the crypto market crashed due to news about Trump's new tariffs."
Minus $6,000 on a Single Stop
Before discovering prop trading, Evgeny traded exclusively with his own funds. He traded currency pairs, gold, and the Forex market, using capital withdrawn from his business.
His results were volatile: sometimes he made money, other times he took losses. His most painful lesson cost him $6,000.
During a trade, Evgeny decided to move his stop-loss, hoping the market would turn around. Instead, the price kept moving against his position, and the loss ballooned to $6,000.
"I eventually made that money back, but I learned my lesson for good. If you start moving your stops and breaking your own rules, trading becomes gambling. Without strict risk management, you have no business being in the market."
This experience later forced him to look at prop trading in a completely different light, where adhering to risk management rules is a strict requirement, not a suggestion.
Transitioning to Prop Trading
As spare funds were being routed toward home improvements and raising his twins, Evgeny had no plans to stop trading.
The solution was prop trading, which allowed him to manage large capital without risking his own money.
"That's when I found out about Hash Hedge. It was a breath of fresh air for me because you can buy a challenge and not risk your personal savings."
The main selling point for the platform was the feedback from practicing traders.
"All doubts vanished; I was 200% sure the platform would pay out my profit."
Evgeny studied Hash Hedge's rules and began dedicating more time to prop trading.
3 Failures on the Way to a Funded Account
Evgeny blew his first three challenges back-to-back, but each failure plugged a specific gap in his risk management.
"If I had been trading with my own money, I probably would have lost much more. The challenge acts as a safety net. Yes, passing it takes time, but it's time well spent. After 2 or 3 attempts, you start to understand risks better, calculate your allowable stop-losses, and stop repeating past mistakes."
The first three challenges served as his best risk-management practice:
1
Attempt 1 ($5,000) → Failed: learning the mechanics.
Evgeny bought his first challenge as a test to understand the platform's mechanics: how orders, stops, and the daily drawdown rules work. He didn't fine-tune his strategy, so he blew the account quickly — it was a trial run.
2
Attempt 2 ($5,000) → Failed: old habits.
He approached the second $5K challenge more seriously, but old habits from trading personal funds persisted. The main issue wasn't position size, but failing to lock in profits: "I have this middle ground between take-profit and stop-loss. I wouldn't close the trade, hoping for more, and ended up getting stopped out at breakeven when the price was just a tiny bit away from my target."
3
Attempt 3 ($10,000) → Failed: oversizing positions.
Moving to a larger account, Evgeny made a classic mistake: he used the same absolute position sizes as on the $5,000 account, which doubled his risk per trade. Drawdown wiped out the account even faster than the previous two.
Fourth Challenge: A $2,000 Payout
On his fourth attempt, Evgeny overhauled his approach to risk. He chose a $10,000 account again but traded it as if he only had $5,000:
Reduced position sizes;
Set stricter stops;
Avoided rushing through the stages.
This cautious strategy took longer but delivered results: Evgeny successfully cleared all stages and received his first payout of $2,000.
"In prop trading, you have no other choice. When you move to the second stage of a challenge, your risk control becomes much tighter. You already know how much time and effort you invested to get there."
Evgeny immediately shared the news of his payout with his group:
"When the payout arrived, I posted the certificate in our group. The guys started asking, 'How does this even work?' and that's how it all started."
The payout fully recouped the cost of his previous attempts and brought Evgeny his first net profit from prop trading.
Tips for Beginners
Today, Evgeny successfully trades on Funded accounts ranging from $10,000 to $25,000.
He advises beginners to start with small accounts.
"When you get your first $200-$300 on a $5,000 or $10,000 challenge, it hits you that this actually works. Psychologically, that is what matters most."
Reflecting on his past mistakes, he notes:
"In prop trading, moving your stops to avoid a loss is impossible. You have fixed limits."
He summarizes the main benefits of the prop trading model as follows:
No personal financial risk: the most you can lose is the entry fee for the challenge;
Strict rules build discipline in a way that self-regulation simply cannot match.
Key Takeaways
1
Business and trading require different energy.
25 years of constantly managing people drained Evgeny more than any market risk. He chose trading not because it is easier, but because he no longer has to rely on other people's responsibility.
2
Control over money is more important than the amount of money.
A steady income without financial planning and reserves creates just as much risk as a reckless trade.
3
A failed challenge is not a defeat; it's the cost of practice.
Blowing three challenges did not derail Evgeny because each failure refined his risk management. On his fourth try, he changed his approach and secured a payout that covered all previous costs.
4
Prop trading enforces risk management.
Hardcoded, unbypassable risk limits build a level of discipline that carries over into trading personal capital.
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