Drawdown Calculator
Find your drawdown and the return needed to recover.
Educational tool only. Not financial advice.
Tracking Trading Account Drawdown
Drawdown measures how far your account balance has fallen from its most recent peak — a critical number for understanding real risk exposure that a simple profit/loss figure doesn’t capture. This drawdown calculator shows both your current drawdown percentage and the return needed to fully recover.
Why recovery math isn’t symmetrical
A 20% drawdown requires a 25% gain to recover, not 20% — and a 50% drawdown requires a full 100% gain. This asymmetry is why avoiding large drawdowns matters more than chasing large individual wins.
Using drawdown to evaluate a strategy
Tracking maximum drawdown over time, not just current drawdown, gives a clearer picture of how much risk a trading strategy actually carries — two strategies with similar average returns can have very different drawdown profiles.
