Drawdown Recovery Calculator
A 50% loss needs a 100% gain to recover. See exactly how much - and how long - to climb back to your high-water mark.
Recovery plan optional - how many trades, and how long?
to climb back to your high-water mark
| Drawdown | Gain to recover |
|---|---|
| 5% | +5.3% |
| 10% | +11.1% |
| 15% | +17.6% |
| 20% | +25.0% |
| 25% | +33.3% |
| 30% | +42.9% |
| 40% | +66.7% |
| 50% | +100% |
| 60% | +150% |
| 75% | +300% |
| 90% | +900% |
You need +25.0% to get back. The math is brutal; the fix is behavioral.
Helix AI builds your recovery plan from the trades that dug the hole - the setups, sessions and sizing behind the drawdown.
Build my recovery planWhy drawdown recovery is asymmetric
A drawdown is how far your account sits below its high-water mark - its peak-to-trough decline in equity. The cruel part is not the size of the hole, it is the shape of the climb out. When you lose a percentage of your account, the gain you need to get back is always larger than the loss, because you have to earn it on the smaller balance the loss left behind. Lose 20% of $10,000 and you are at $8,000; a 20% gain on $8,000 is only $1,600, which leaves you short. You need 25% to make back the full $2,000. That is the entire idea behind a loss recovery calculator: the gain to break even is never equal to the loss, and it grows faster the deeper you fall.
This is the mirror image of compounding. Reinvested gains bend the growth curve upward because each gain enlarges the base for the next; a drawdown bends it downward for the same reason in reverse. The required gain needed to break even rises gently at first and then goes vertical - 10% needs 11%, 30% needs 43%, but 60% needs 150% and 80% needs a quadruple. The calculator plots that wall and marks your own drawdown on it, so the number is something you see rather than something you are told.
The formula
The required gain to recover from a drawdown is one line of math:
20% drawdown = 0.20 / 0.80 = 0.25 = +25% · 50% = 0.50 / 0.50 = +100%
If you are working from balances instead of a percentage, the drawdown is simply (peak - current) / peak, and the money you need to make back is the same dollars you lost - earned as a larger percentage of the smaller account. Both routes land on the same required gain to break even; the Balances mode above just fills in the dollar figure for you and keeps it in your account currency, without converting anything.
The asymmetry, in a table
These are the numbers every trader should have memorized before they size their next position. They are also the rows the calculator exports as a spreadsheet if you want the full drawdown recovery table on hand.
40% → +66.7% · 50% → +100% · 60% → +150% · 75% → +300% · 90% → +900%
Notice how flat the first half is and how fast the second half runs. Everything up to about 20% is recoverable inside a good month. Past 50%, you are being asked to double your money just to get back to where you started - and past 75%, to quadruple it. That is why the professional obsession is with keeping the drawdown small in the first place, not with heroics on the way back.
A worked example: the 50% hole
Say a $10,000 account draws down to $5,000 - a 50% drawdown, the number people search for most. To get back to the $10,000 high-water mark you have to turn $5,000 into $10,000, which is a 100% gain. Now put a clock on it. A disciplined trader compounding at a genuinely strong 10% a year would need more than seven years to climb back; at 20% a year, still close to four. Markets tell the same story: the S&P 500 fell about 57% in the 2008 crisis and took roughly six years to reach a new high. A 50% recovery is not a bad week you grind through - it is a chapter of your trading life.
Feed the same drawdown your own trading stats - win rate, average risk to reward, risk per trade - and the calculator turns the abstract 100% into a concrete count of trades, then a calendar estimate at your pace. It shows two numbers on purpose: the optimistic textbook figure, and the honest one with losing streaks priced in, because streaks are what make real recoveries take longer than a spreadsheet promises.
The trap: sizing up to recover faster
When traders see how steep the climb is, the instinct is to trade bigger and get it over with. This is the most expensive instinct in the book, and the math shows exactly why. Your expected growth per trade rises as you increase risk - but only up to a point, called your optimal growth risk. Push past it and variance drag takes over: the swings get so large that your compounded return actually falls, and the recovery gets slower even though each trade risks more. Past a further threshold, geometric growth crosses zero and you never recover at all, because a normal losing streak at that size destroys more than the winners can rebuild.
For a 50% win rate at a 2:1 payoff, that optimal risk sits around 25% per trade - already far more than anyone sane trades - and the point of no return is 50% per trade. The digging-deeper chart above draws this for your own edge: trades to recover fall, bottom out at your optimal risk, then rise, and hit a red wall where recovery becomes impossible. The honest takeaway is that recovering faster is a behavioral problem, not a sizing one. The account climbs back on the same discipline that would have kept the drawdown shallow to begin with.
What a healthy drawdown looks like
Most professional traders keep their maximum drawdown under about 20%, and treat 10 to 15% as the zone where they slow down and review sizing rather than strategy. The prop-firm industry encodes the same instinct from the other side: the popular evaluations cap the total loss you are allowed at roughly 8 to 12% of the account, and a trailing drawdown that follows your equity up means the recovery bar moves with your high-water mark. If you trade a funded account, the gain to break even is not the only thing that matters - a breach ends the account before any recovery can happen, which is a different tool than this one. This calculator answers the equity question: given the hole, what does the climb out require.
Using the calculator
Enter your drawdown as a percentage, or switch to Balances and give it your peak and current account values - the tool derives the drawdown, the money lost, and the required gain to break even, and marks your point on the asymmetry curve. Open the Recovery plan section to add your win rate, risk to reward, and risk per trade, and it estimates the trades and the calendar time to recover, plus the digging-deeper chart that shows what changing your risk would really do. The link button shares your exact setup, and the CSV download hands you the full recovery table as a spreadsheet.
Three sibling tools sit next to this one. The Position Size Calculator is how you keep a drawdown from getting deep in the first place. The Risk/Reward Calculator pressure-tests the win rate and ratio you feed the recovery estimate, and the Compounding Calculator shows the same growth math running the other way - the same expectancy formula connects all three.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a TradeDNA account to use this calculator?
No. Every tool here is standalone and free - no signup, no usage limits. A TradeDNA account is for what comes after the math: recovering is behavioral, not arithmetic, so the product rebuilds your recovery plan from the actual trades that dug the hole - the setups, sessions, and sizing behind the drawdown - instead of a guessed win rate.
What gain do I need to recover a loss?
The required gain is drawdown / (1 - drawdown). A 10% loss needs 11.1% back, 20% needs 25%, 25% needs 33.3%, 30% needs 42.9%, 50% needs 100%, and 75% needs 300%. The gain is always larger than the loss because it is earned on the smaller balance the loss left behind - that is the whole reason a breakeven after a loss is harder than it looks.
Why is a 50% loss harder to recover than a 25% loss?
Because the required-gain curve is not linear, it is exponential. A 25% drawdown needs a 33% gain, but a 50% drawdown needs a 100% gain - not double the effort, but triple, because each further loss shrinks the base the recovery has to grow from. Doubling the drawdown far more than doubles the gain needed to break even. The chart above marks your own point on that wall.
How long does it take to recover from a trading drawdown?
It depends on your edge and how often you trade, not just the size of the hole. Enter your win rate, risk to reward, and risk per trade and the calculator returns the number of trades to climb back, plus a calendar estimate. As a rough benchmark, a trader risking 1% at a 2:1 payoff and a 50% win rate needs roughly 45 trades to recover 20% and over 250 to recover 50% - and real recoveries usually run slower, because performance tends to dip during a drawdown, not improve.
Should I increase my position size to recover faster?
Almost never. It is the single most expensive instinct in trading. Sizing up shortens the recovery on paper only up to a point - your optimal growth risk - and past that, variance drag actually makes recovery slower, not faster. Past a further threshold the math flips entirely and you never recover, because a big losing streak at that size takes more than the wins can rebuild. The digging-deeper chart above shows exactly where those two lines are for your edge.
Can you recover from a 70% or 90% drawdown?
Mathematically, a 70% drawdown needs a 233% gain and a 90% drawdown needs a 900% gain - a tenfold return just to get back to flat. It is not impossible, but for a retail trader it usually means the account is gone in every way that matters. The lesson runs the other way: the cheapest recovery is the drawdown you never take, which is why position sizing and a daily-loss limit matter more than any comeback plan.
What is a normal or acceptable drawdown?
Professionals typically keep maximum drawdown under about 20%, and many treat 10 to 15% as the line where they review their sizing. Prop-firm evaluations encode the same idea: most cap the total loss you are allowed at 8 to 12% of the account. A drawdown past 30% is not just a bigger number - it needs a 43%+ gain to undo and usually signals that risk per trade, not strategy, is the thing to fix.
What is the difference between a drawdown and a loss?
A loss is a single trade that closed red. A drawdown is the peak-to-trough decline in your account equity - how far you are below your high-water mark, whatever mix of wins and losses got you there. Recovery math is always measured against the drawdown, because that is the gap you have to close to reach a new equity high, which is also how trailing drawdown recovery is judged inside a prop account.