Trade Breakdown · · 4 min read

How a 1:175 Risk-to-Reward Trade Happens With Candle Range Theory

My best CRT Radar trade, broken down: why a turtle soup entry allows a tiny stop and how the higher-timeframe range sets the target.

A 1:175 risk-to-reward trade sounds like a typo. It isn't — but it also isn't magic, and it isn't something you should expect every week. It's what happens when a very small, well-defined risk lines up with a target that the higher timeframe already gave you. This post walks through why Candle Range Theory makes that geometry possible, using my 1:175 CRT Radar trade as the example. (It has since been beaten — see the 1:188 MNQ trade from the Sunday Asia open.)

Honest disclaimer

This is one of my best trades, shown as an example of the structure. Most trades are much smaller, and plenty lose. Nothing here is a promise of results — it's a breakdown of the mechanics.

Risk-to-reward is two numbers, not one

Every R multiple is just a ratio: distance to target divided by distance to stop. To get a big number you can either push the target further away, or pull the stop in tighter. Chasing bigger targets mostly gets you stopped out at breakeven. The real lever is the stop.

In CRT, the stop isn't a guess or a fixed number of pips. It's defined by the candle that proved the manipulation is over. When that candle is small and the higher-timeframe range is large, the ratio explodes.

The three pieces of the setup

Candle Range Theory reads price as a three-candle story on a higher timeframe:

  1. Candle 1 (the range). It sets a high and a low. Resting orders — stops and breakout entries — pile up just outside both sides.
  2. Candle 2 (the purge). Price runs one side of Candle 1, takes that liquidity, and then has to show it can't hold out there.
  3. Candle 3 (the delivery). If Candle 2 closes back inside the range, Candle 3 tends to deliver price toward the opposite side of Candle 1.

The target is already on the chart before you ever enter: the opposite extreme of Candle 1. On a 4-hour or 6-hour CRT, that can be hundreds of points away.

Where the tiny stop comes from: the turtle soup

The part most traders skip is how you confirm Candle 2 has finished purging. In the CRT Radar, I require a turtle soup on a lower timeframe: a 15- or 30-minute candle runs the previous candle's high beyond Candle 1, then closes back below it (mirror that at the lows).

That one candle does two jobs:

  • It confirms the run on liquidity failed — buyers who chased the breakout are now trapped.
  • It defines the invalidation precisely. If price trades back above that purge high, the idea is wrong. Your stop sits just beyond it.

Then you drop to the entry timeframe and wait for an entry requirement to print after the turtle soup — an order block, an inverse fair value gap, a balanced price range, or a change in state of delivery (CISD). Entering off that small structure, with the stop beyond the purge, is what keeps the risk tiny.

Putting the geometry together

Picture it:

  • The stop is a few points beyond a 15-minute purge candle.
  • The target is the far side of a higher-timeframe Candle 1 range.
  • Candle 3 delivers all the way there.

Divide one by the other and you get numbers that look unreal. That's the 1:175 — not a lucky lottery ticket, but a small, rule-based risk paired with a target the market had already drawn.

What this means if you trade a prop firm account

I trade multiple prop firm accounts, and the lesson I'd take from this isn't "aim for 1:175." It's this:

  • Your edge is in the stop, not the target. Tight, logical invalidation keeps losses small enough to survive daily drawdown rules.
  • Take partials and protect the account. You don't need to hold every runner to the opposite extreme. A trade like this pays for weeks of small losses — but only if you're still funded when it shows up.
  • Wait for the sequence. Most of the bad trades I see come from entering Candle 2 before the turtle soup prints. The CRT Radar's entry requirements all wait for it for exactly that reason.

Want to see setups like this on your own chart?

The CRT Radar marks the Candle 1 range, the Candle 2 purge, the turtle soup and the entry requirements automatically, so you're not hand-drawing every session. If you want to try the logic for free first, CRT Radar Lite runs the Classic model with no settings to fiddle with.

For the full rule set — models, timing, stop and target placement — it's all in the CRT Handbook. And every trade I take gets logged on the daily results page, wins and losses both.