Hunter KillerCreate free accountKelly Criterion Calculator
Work out the mathematically optimal stake for an edge you can actually measure, and see why half Kelly is what practitioners use.
Your Kelly stake
Kelly sizes a bet from your edge. It answers "how much", but only once you genuinely know your win rate and your payoff ratio.
Kelly assumes your edge is KNOWN. On an estimated edge it systematically over-bets, and on an edge that is not real it is a ruin machine: a negative result here means the setup loses money on average and no position size fixes that. Even on a real edge, full Kelly swings are violent. Half and quarter Kelly exist because the variance of the full fraction is more than most accounts can sit through.
Kelly is only as good as the edge you feed it
Our own edge pipeline has run 99 hypotheses and produced zero survivors of a net-positive, confidence-bounded gate. That is the honest prior: most apparent edges are not real, and Kelly on an edge that is not real is a ruin machine. We publish what our numbers do and do not support.
Convert that stake into a position size
Size from the stop, never from the leverage. This is the single habit that separates accounts that survive from accounts that do not.
Leverage then only decides the margin you post, never how much you can lose. The danger of high leverage is that it places liquidation BEFORE your stop, so the exchange closes the trade for you at a price you never chose.
Term: Leverage · Overfitting · Out of sample · Walk-forward validation
Questions traders actually ask
What is the Kelly formula?
f* = W - (1 - W) / R, where W is win rate as a decimal and R is average win divided by average loss. The result is the fraction of the account to stake. A negative result means the setup has no edge and should not be traded at any size.
Why use half Kelly?
Full Kelly assumes your win rate and payoff ratio are known exactly. They are estimates from a finite sample, and overestimating either causes systematic over-betting with severe drawdowns. Half Kelly keeps most of the growth with a fraction of the variance, which is why it is the practical standard. Quarter Kelly gives up more growth again for still smaller drawdowns, a reasonable pick when the sample behind your edge is thin.
Can I use Kelly for crypto futures?
The mathematics does not care about the instrument, but it assumes a stable, known edge and independent outcomes. Crypto returns cluster and regimes shift, so treat any Kelly output as an upper bound and size below it.
Is this free?
Yes, no account, nothing stored. Everything runs in your browser.
Keep going with the other free tools
- Position size calculator: size any trade from your stop, not your leverage
- Liquidation price calculator: see exactly where leverage force-closes this position
- Funding rate calculator: what perpetual funding costs or earns over the life of a position
- Crypto P&L calculator: net P&L, ROE and breakeven after fees and funding
- What is liquidation in crypto? The plain-English explainer with a worked example
- Liquidation heatmap explained: how to read the clusters and spot a cascade path
- Coinglass alternative: compare research tools and inspect the public record, misses included
- Liquidation map for TradingView users: measured levels beside your TV charts
- Hyblock alternative: the honest side-by-side with the orderflow analytics suite
- Money Map: estimated liquidation concentrations in dollars, 2 hours behind
Guides from the library
Educational tools, not financial advice. Trading perpetual futures carries a real risk of total loss.
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