📐 TRADING TOOL
Drawdown Recovery Calculator
See exactly how many winning trades — and how long — it takes to climb back from a drawdown. Model different risk levels and compare recovery paths.
Recovery at Different Risk Levels
Your current risk is highlighted. Shows expected trades to recover the same drawdown at different risk-per-trade settings.
| Risk / Trade |
Gain Needed |
Expected Trades |
Daily Estimate |
Weekly Estimate |
Key insight: Doubling your risk doesn't halve your recovery time — it roughly halves the number of trades needed, but each trade carries more variance. Increasing risk after a drawdown is the most common way traders turn a 20% loss into a 40% loss.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does recovery require a bigger gain than the loss? ▾
Because you're working from a smaller base. Lose 20% and you need 25% to recover. Lose 50% and you need 100%. The math is: required gain = loss% / (1 − loss%). This asymmetry is why capital preservation is the first rule of trading.
Should I increase risk size to recover faster? ▾
No. This is the most common mistake. Increasing risk after a drawdown raises your ruin probability. The correct approach is to maintain or reduce risk and let your edge play out over a statistically significant sample of trades.
How are expected trades to recover calculated? ▾
Expected recovery trades = gain needed / (expectancy per trade × risk per trade). Expectancy = (win rate × reward) − (loss rate × risk). This gives the average number of trades for a trader with your edge to recover that exact percentage gain.
What is a good recovery factor? ▾
Recovery factor = net profit / maximum drawdown. A ratio above 2 is generally considered acceptable for live trading. Above 3 is strong. It tells you how efficiently the system recovers from its worst historical losses.