Drawdown Calculator: How Much You Need to Recover a Loss
Losses and gains aren't symmetrical. A 50% loss needs a 100% gain to recover. Enter a drawdown and your risk per trade to see the maths that keeps careful traders careful.
Drawdown is the fall from an account's peak, and recovering it takes a larger percentage gain than the loss: 20% down needs 25% back, 50% down needs 100%. Losing streaks are normal, and even at a 60% win rate five losses in a row within 100 trades is close to a coin flip.
Drawdown recovery calculator
Why recovery is harder than the loss
After a loss you're recovering from a smaller balance. Lose 20% of $10,000 and you have $8,000; getting back to $10,000 needs +$2,000, which is 25% of $8,000. The deeper the hole, the steeper this gets.
| Drawdown | Gain to recover |
|---|---|
| 10% | 11.1% |
| 20% | 25% |
| 30% | 42.9% |
| 40% | 66.7% |
| 50% | 100% |
| 75% | 300% |
Losing streaks are normal
Even a method that wins more than half the time will have runs of losses. Over hundreds of trades, streaks of five, eight or more are common. The table in the calculator shows what a streak does at your chosen risk per trade: at 1% risk, ten losses in a row leaves about 90% of the account; at 5% risk, about 60%.
How likely is a losing streak, really?
This is the table most people have never seen. It gives the chance of hitting at least one losing streak of that length somewhere in your next 100 trades, purely from the maths of independent trades at each win rate. Nothing about your skill changes these odds.
| Win rate | 5 in a row | 6 | 7 | 8 | 10 | 12 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 40% | 98% | 87% | 69% | 49% | 20% | 8% |
| 50% | 81% | 55% | 32% | 17% | 4% | 1% |
| 60% | 46% | 21% | 9% | 4% | 1% | <1% |
Read it this way: even winning 60% of the time, a five-trade losing run inside 100 trades is close to a coin flip. At 40%, which is normal for a method that wins big when it wins, eight losses in a row is about even money. So the question is never "will I have a streak", it's "what does my account look like after one". Run your number through the risk of ruin calculator, which simulates thousands of sequences rather than assuming an average.
Chart Bound is a free browser game that drills exactly this on real historical charts: read the candles, make the call, see instantly if you were right.
Play free, no signup →How traders limit drawdowns
- Keep risk per trade small and fixed.
- Use a daily loss limit that ends the session.
- Cut size after a string of losses, rather than increasing it to "win it back".
- Watch correlated positions, which can turn one bad move into several losses.
Prop firm challenges enforce these limits with hard rules; see how prop challenges work.
Frequently asked questions
How much gain is needed to recover a 50% loss?
100%. After losing half the account, you need to double the remaining balance to get back to where you started.
What is a drawdown in trading?
The decline from a peak in account value to a subsequent low, usually shown as a percentage of the peak.
What is an acceptable drawdown?
It depends on the trader and the method, but many risk-conscious traders and prop firms keep maximum drawdown around 10% or less.
How do I recover from a drawdown?
Reduce size, return strictly to your written setup, and review what caused the losses. Increasing size to recover faster usually deepens the drawdown.
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