Drawdown Recovery Calculator

A drawdown is a decline from a peak value down to a trough, usually expressed as a percentage. Recovering from one requires a larger percentage gain than the percentage lost, because the gain is earned on a smaller base. The formula is required gain = loss ÷ (1 − loss), with both expressed as decimals.

The asymmetry is easy to underestimate. A 10% loss needs only about an 11% gain to recover, which feels fair. But a 50% loss needs a 100% gain, and a 90% loss needs a 900% gain. This is why controlling the depth of losses matters so much: the deeper the hole, the disproportionately harder it is to climb out, and the relationship accelerates rather than staying linear.

Understanding recovery math is central to how investors and traders think about risk. It explains why maximum drawdown is such a closely watched statistic, and why many people focus on limiting the size of losses rather than only chasing gains. The reference table above shows how quickly the required recovery grows as losses deepen.

This is a mathematical relationship, not advice about acceptable risk levels or when to cut a loss. Those decisions are entirely your own.

TradingView is one of the most widely used charting and market-analysis platforms, where traders and analysts study price movement across stocks, crypto, forex, and futures on interactive charts. Pine Script is TradingView's own lightweight programming language, created so anyone can build custom tools that run directly on those charts.

People use Pine Script to build four main kinds of tools. Indicators calculate and plot values on the chart, exactly like the calculation above, but recomputed automatically on every bar. Strategies add explicit entry and exit rules and can be backtested against historical data in TradingView's Strategy Tester to see how they would have behaved. Screeners scan many symbols at once for conditions you define. Alerts notify you the moment a condition you specified occurs, so you do not have to watch the screen.

The value is precision and automation. Instead of eyeballing a chart, you describe exactly what you want measured, visualized, or notified about, and TradingView runs it consistently across any market and timeframe. That is why traders, analysts, and developers write Pine Script: it turns a manual charting idea into a repeatable tool. These tools are for tracking, visualizing, and testing market ideas; they do not tell you what to trade, and that decision always remains yours.

Writing that code by hand means learning Pine Script's syntax, its type system, and the exact names of hundreds of built-in functions. It is a real programming language, and small mistakes stop a script from compiling in the Pine Editor.