Drawdown Recovery Calculator

Losses and gains are not symmetric: percentages compound from different bases. A 10 percent drawdown needs 11 percent to recover, 25 percent needs 33, and a 50 percent drawdown needs a full 100 percent gain just to return to the peak.

This calculator turns a peak-to-trough loss into the gain required to break even, and, given an assumed annual return, the years that recovery consumes. The asymmetry accelerates brutally in the tail, which is the arithmetic case for why drawdown control dominates return maximisation in institutional portfolio design.

The same arithmetic explains volatility drag: two portfolios with the same average return but different volatility end at different wealth, and the gap is paid in exactly these asymmetric recoveries.

Background reading: Maximum drawdown in the Knowledge Hub · All tools