Why the gap widens faster than it looks
A drawdown and the gain that undoes it are never the same size, and the difference between them is not a fixed margin. A 10% drop needs 11.11% to get back, which reads like a rounding detail. A 20% drop needs 25%. A 50% drop needs 100%. The reason is that the two percentages are measured on different bases: the loss is taken from the balance at the peak, while the gain that reverses it has to be produced by the smaller balance left behind. Every unit of capital that leaves also leaves less behind to do the work of bringing it back, so each further point of drawdown costs more than the one before it.
Across the shallow end of the table the two columns run close together, and the gap is easy to dismiss. Past the halfway mark they separate completely: 70% down asks for 233%, and 90% down asks for 900%, a tenfold return to end exactly where the account already stood. Nothing about any market changes across that range. The arithmetic does. What follows from it is that the cost of a drawdown is paid mostly in its last stretch, and that keeping an account out of that stretch is a question of how much risk is open at once rather than of any single trade — our portfolio heat calculator adds up what is already committed.
Measured from the peak, not from where the account started
Drawdown is measured from the highest balance an account has reached, not from the capital it opened with. An account funded with 10,000 that grew to 15,000 and now sits at 12,000 is 20% ahead of where it started and 20% below its own peak at the same time. Both readings are correct, and they answer different questions. The first says whether the account has made money since it opened. The second says how much of what it had made has been given back, and it is the one this page is built on: the gain that returns the balance to 15,000 has to come from 12,000, not from the 10,000 the account began with.
That distinction matters beyond bookkeeping, because most plans size a trade as a share of the balance they hold today rather than of the balance they once held. As a drawdown deepens, the same rule quietly stakes less money on each idea, which is the correct behaviour and also the reason the road back is longer than the road down. Our position size calculator works out that per-trade figure from the account as it stands, and reading it again after a drawdown, rather than carrying over the number from before, is what keeps the rule consistent with itself.
Why coming back asks more than the fall did
Two things move against an account in a drawdown, and they move at the same time. The distance to be covered grows faster than the drop, as the table shows. Meanwhile the size of each step shrinks, because a plan risking 1% of the balance stakes 100 on a 10,000 account and 70 once that account is 30% down. A longer road, covered in shorter steps, is the whole of why recovering takes more attempts than the sequence that caused the damage took. The gain-per-trade field puts a number on that: at a steady pace, it counts the winning steps needed, compounding each one on the balance the previous step left.
The tempting shortcut is to widen the risk per trade so the road gets shorter, which works in the arithmetic and enlarges the next drawdown by exactly the same factor. The alternative is slower and holds up better: leave the sizing rule where it was, and let the recovery take the number of attempts it takes. Which levels a stop belongs behind, and how much of an account one idea is allowed to carry, are decisions taken before a drawdown rather than during one, and our methodology page covers how we think about that placement.
How to read each number
The headline figure is the gain the remaining capital has to produce to reach the previous peak, or, in the second mode, the drawdown that a given gain undoes. Drop from the peak restates the loss as a percentage, whether it was typed in or worked out from the two balances, and what is left of the peak is the other side of that same figure: a balance holding half of its peak and a gain requirement of 100% are one fact stated twice. Given back from the peak appears only when both balances are entered, the only case where the loss can be stated in money rather than as a share. Trades at that pace appears only with a gain per trade, and counts compounding steps rounded up, not a division.
