You are down. What does getting back actually take?
Losses and gains are not symmetric: a 50% loss needs a 100% gain to undo. The gap widens the deeper you go, and the time it takes widens faster still. This puts both numbers on the table.
Diagnosis
The percentage is the easy half. These checks look at how long it takes, how much that estimate can move, and whether the strategy earns enough for the question to have an answer at all.
How the hole deepens
The required return does not track the loss. At 10% down you owe 11%; at 50% you owe 100%; at 90% you owe 900%. Every row below assumes the monthly return you entered.
| Drawdown | Return needed | Months to recover | Use |
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The honest range
A single number for recovery time is a fiction: the months that follow are not identical. This replays them thousands of times with your volatility and reports where the answer actually lands.
Why a range and not a date
Compounding is path-dependent. Two accounts with the same average monthly return recover at different times depending on the order the good months arrive in, and a bad month early costs more than a bad month late. A point estimate hides that entirely, which is why the slow case usually sits far above the median rather than symmetrically around it.
How this is calculated
The required return is loss ÷ (1 − loss). It grows faster than the loss because you have to earn the gain on what is left rather than on what you had. That single fraction is why traders who cap drawdowns at 20% survive strategies that traders who let them reach 60% do not.
Time is the part people skip. At 2% a month, a 20% drawdown takes about 11 months to undo and a 50% one takes about 35 — and that is the version with no bad months in it. Halving the monthly return more than doubles the wait, because the recovery is compounding, not adding.
The range comes from simulating monthly returns drawn around your average with your volatility. It is not a forecast: it assumes the strategy keeps working exactly as it has, which is the assumption most likely to be wrong. Read it as the spread you should expect even if nothing changes.
Nothing is uploaded. Every number on this page is computed in your browser, and the link you copy carries only the values you typed.
Related tools
A drawdown that is still open has no recovery time yet — only a required return. Everything here assumes the strategy continues to perform as it did before the drawdown started.