Drawdown recovery calculator
Losses and gains are not symmetric. See how much you need to make back after a drawdown, and what a losing streak does to your account at your risk per trade.
Or try it on your chart first, no accountGain needed to recover a loss
Losing streak
Common drawdowns
| Loss | Gain to recover |
|---|---|
| 10% | 11.1% |
| 20% | 25.0% |
| 30% | 42.9% |
| 50% | 100% |
| 75% | 300% |
Educational tool, not financial advice. Excludes fees and slippage.
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How the calculation works
After a loss of L percent, the account is worth (1 - L) of what it was, so the gain needed to get back is 1 / (1 - L) - 1. A losing streak of n trades, each risking r percent of the current balance, leaves (1 - r) to the power n of the account.
Example
A 20% loss needs a 25% gain to recover, a 50% loss needs 100%, and a 75% loss needs 300%. Ten losses in a row at 1% risk leave about 90.4% of the account, a 9.6% drawdown that needs about 10.6% to recover. At 5% risk the same streak is a 40.1% drawdown that needs about 67% back.
What to do with it
Small risk per trade keeps drawdowns in the zone where recovery is realistic. Pick a risk percent you could survive a long losing streak with, then size every trade from it with the position size calculator. This is educational, not financial advice.
Questions
Why does a 50% loss need a 100% gain?
Because the gain is measured on the smaller balance. $1,000 down 50% is $500, and $500 has to double to get back to $1,000.
What is a normal drawdown?
It depends on the strategy and the risk per trade. A strategy that wins half its trades will see long losing streaks over a few hundred trades, so size so that 10 or more losses in a row stay survivable.
Does the losing streak use a fixed or a shrinking amount?
A shrinking amount: each loss is the risk percent of the balance at that moment, which is how most traders size. Risking a fixed dollar amount instead makes drawdowns slightly deeper.
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