Drawdown and Recovery Calculator
Enter the peak and trough balance from a backtest or a live record to see what the drawdown really was — and the gain required to climb back out of it. Free, no signup, nothing you type leaves your browser.
Two figures in. The calculator returns the amount lost, the drawdown as a percentage, and the return needed on the reduced balance to get back to level.
Drawdown and Recovery Are Not Symmetrical
This is the number most people get wrong, and the reason is simple: the recovery is calculated on the reduced balance, not the original one. Lose 50% of a £10,000 account and you are at £5,000. Getting back to £10,000 means making £5,000 on a £5,000 balance — a 100% gain, not a 50% one.
| Drawdown | Gain required to recover |
|---|---|
| 10% | 11.1% |
| 20% | 25.0% |
| 30% | 42.9% |
| 40% | 66.7% |
| 50% | 100.0% |
| 60% | 150.0% |
| 70% | 233.3% |
The gap widens sharply as losses deepen. Up to about 20% the recovery is a similar order of magnitude to the loss. Past 50% it is a different problem entirely — the account has to double simply to return to where it started.
This is why a drawdown figure tells you more about an Expert Advisor's viability than its headline return does, and why two EAs with identical annual returns are not equivalent. The one that got there through a shallower drawdown had a materially easier job and is likelier to be repeatable.
Two Things That Make a Drawdown Figure Understate Reality
Backtested drawdown is a floor, not a forecast
Our working expectation is that live drawdown runs roughly 1.5 to 2 times the backtested figure once real spreads, slippage and execution delays are applied. Generated tick data understates it further, particularly for grid, martingale and basket strategies, because it does not reproduce spread widening, gaps or stress-period conditions. If a vendor's backtest was not run at 99% real ticks, treat the drawdown it reports as optimistic.
Balance and equity are different measurements
Drawdown measured on closed trades ignores how far open positions travelled against you before recovering. An account can show a modest balance drawdown while its equity was far lower at some point intraday. That distinction is academic on your own capital and decisive on a funded account, because prop firms generally measure on equity — which is why a challenge can fail on a day that finished flat.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does a 50% drawdown need a 100% gain to recover?
Should I measure drawdown on balance or on equity?
How much worse is live drawdown than backtested drawdown?
What drawdown is acceptable for an Expert Advisor?
Is it free, and do you store what I enter?
Before You Judge an EA on Its Drawdown
A drawdown figure is only as good as the record it came from, and the records are where most of the problems are. We publish two free documents covering the checks we run before we will cover a product at all: the EA Red Flag Checklist, and a Broker and VPS Quick Reference covering the conditions an EA actually needs to perform as advertised.
Both are yours the moment you submit — the download page opens immediately, with no waiting and nothing to find in your inbox. The marketing email tick-box is optional and you can leave it blank.
The Arithmetic Is Never Wrong. The Input Often Is.
The relationship between a loss and the gain needed to recover it is fixed — it cannot be argued with. What can be wrong is the drawdown figure you put into it. Vendor backtests understate it. Accounts that traded several products at once attribute it to the wrong strategy. A balance-based figure hides how far the equity actually fell.
And if you are assessing an EA for a funded account, the percentage on its own cannot answer the question at all, because the limit type changes the outcome. We ran one strategy against FTMO's published rules over twenty months: the same figures survived the 2-Step static limit by £190 and breached the 1-Step trailing limit by £153.57. Same settings, same period, opposite results. How static and trailing limits differ explains why.
This tool performs arithmetic on figures you supply and runs entirely in your browser. It is not financial advice and it is not a prediction — it shows what a recovery would require, not whether one will happen. Drawdown measured on closed balance and drawdown measured on equity are different figures, and a strategy holding unrealised losses open can differ substantially between the two. Past performance, including backtested performance, is not a guarantee of future results.
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