A 50% loss requires a 100% gain to recover. See exactly what you're up against.
The Drawdown Recovery Calculator shows how much your account needs to gain to get back to breakeven after a loss. A 50% loss requires a 100% gain to recover — this asymmetry is why capital preservation matters so much.
Enter your starting account balance and either your current balance or the percentage you've lost — the two fields auto-sync. The calculator returns the percentage gain you need to recover to your starting balance, the dollar gain required, and a chart showing how the recovery percentage rises sharply once losses pass 25%. The "consecutive winning months" estimator below converts the recovery into a realistic timeline at typical monthly returns (1%, 2%, 5%, 10%) so you can see whether you're looking at one quarter or two years to climb out.
After a loss of P percent, the gain required to recover is P / (1 − P). A 10% loss needs ~11% to recover; a 25% loss needs ~33%; a 50% loss needs 100%; a 75% loss needs 300%; a 90% loss needs 900%. The curve goes vertical as you approach total ruin. This is why professional traders obsess over capital preservation: a small drawdown is recoverable in a normal trading month, but a deep drawdown can take years and may be impossible to claw back if your edge isn't large enough to compound through it.
Cap per-trade risk at 1–2% of account so a string of losers caps total drawdown. Stop trading after a fixed daily loss to avoid emotional spirals. Track drawdown weekly, not just at year end. And remember: a flat month is sometimes the best possible outcome — protecting capital when conditions are bad lets the next opportunity compound from a higher base.