Position Size Calculator: How to Calculate Forex Lot Size in Seconds
The prevention side of drawdown. Smaller position sizes today mean shallower recoveries tomorrow.
Drawdown Recovery Calculator: How Much You Need to Gain to Climb Back
Lose 50% of your account and you need a 100% gain to break even. The Drawdown Recovery Calculator turns that uncomfortable arithmetic into a number you can stare at — ideally before the drawdown happens.
Every trader thinks of drawdown as a number that goes down. It is actually a number that bends, asymmetrically, against you. Lose 10% and you need 11.1% to get back. Lose 20% and you need 25%. Lose 50% and you need 100%. Lose 90% and you need 900%, which is statistically a polite way of saying the account is over. The Drawdown Recovery Calculator exists to make that asymmetry visible before you take a trade that triggers it.
I went through a real drawdown in 2022. The number was 38% from peak. The recovery I needed was just over 61%. I did the math on the back of a notebook, looked at it, and made coffee. Then I cut my position sizing in half for the next three months and did nothing fancy. It took six months to climb back. The lesson was not 'don't lose money' — everyone loses money. The lesson was that the recovery math is so brutal that you must avoid the deep drawdown in the first place, because once you are in it, getting out is a slower job than getting in was.
What The Calculator Does
You enter the peak balance your account reached and the current balance. It returns three numbers — the drawdown in percent, the gain percentage required to reach the peak again, and the recovery multiple (how many times the current balance you need to land on the old high). It also shows a reference table of common drawdown depths and their corresponding recovery requirements, so you can internalise the asymmetry without having a calculator open.
The Reference Table Worth Memorising
- −10% drawdown → +11.1% to recover. Manageable. A normal bad week.
- −20% drawdown → +25% to recover. Painful but routine in active trading.
- −30% drawdown → +42.9% to recover. The point where most traders quit.
- −50% drawdown → +100% to recover. You now have to double the account.
- −75% drawdown → +300% to recover. Functionally a fresh account, with worse psychology.
- −90% drawdown → +900% to recover. Has happened, will happen again, almost never to the same trader.
What The Math Forces You To Do
Once you accept that a 50% drawdown costs you a 100% recovery, the risk-per-trade conversation changes shape. Risking 5% per trade means a ten-trade losing streak — which any decent strategy will produce eventually — leaves you needing a 67% gain to recover. Risking 1% per trade leaves you needing 10.5%. The choice is not abstract. It is the difference between a trader who recovers in two months and a trader who never recovers.
The One Rule Worth Writing On The Monitor
If your account is more than 20% off its peak, cut position size in half until you recover at least half of the drawdown. Then re-evaluate. This is not optional. It is the only rule that prevents the spiral where revenge trades turn a recoverable drawdown into a terminal one. The calculator makes the consequences of breaking the rule mathematically obvious — which is why I open it before I open the trading platform any week the equity curve looks ugly.
Try the Drawdown Recovery Calculator
See exactly what it takes to climb back from any drawdown — and why prevention is cheaper than recovery. Free, no signup.
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