Maximum drawdown calculator
Paste an equity curve — one value per line — and get the maximum peak-to-trough fall, the peak and trough it happened between, how long it took to recover, and the deepest drawdowns behind it.
Your equity curve
One number per line (commas and spaces also work). Use account equity or balance at a consistent interval — daily closes are the usual choice. Parsed 14 values.
Result
- Peak
- 11,250.00 at point 4
- Trough
- 10,120.00 at point 7
- Fall in value
- 1,130.00
- Points from peak to trough
- 3
- Points to recover to the peak
- 2
- Points in series
- 14
Amber dot is the peak the maximum drawdown is measured from; rose dot is the trough. Range 10,000.00 – 12,310.00.
The deepest drawdowns in this series
| Depth | Peak | Trough | Recovered at |
|---|---|---|---|
| -10.04% | #4 | #7 | #9 |
| -6.63% | #10 | #12 | #13 |
A drawdown ends only when equity makes a new high, not when it stops falling. Two strategies with the same maximum drawdown can look very different here: one deep fall with a fast recovery, or several medium ones with none.
The formula, so you can check it
peak(i) = max(equity[0..i]) # running maximum, never resets dd(i) = equity[i] / peak(i) - 1 # zero or negative MDD = min(dd) # the most negative value
The running peak only ever moves upward. It does not reset when the curve recovers, because a drawdown is measured from the highest level ever reached, not from a recent high.
Four reasons your number disagrees with your platform's
- Equity versus balance. Balance counts closed trades only; equity includes open positions. A strategy that holds a loser for a week shows no balance drawdown until it closes — and then shows all of it at once. The equity figure is the risk you were actually carrying.
- Sampling frequency. The same strategy has a larger maximum drawdown on finer data, because intraday excursions never appear in a daily series. Neither is wrong: one is the worst moment you would sit through, the other the worst day-end position.
- Segmenting. If a report computes drawdown per month and shows the worst month, that is the worst monthly drawdown, not the maximum. Splitting a decline across a boundary makes both halves smaller than the real fall, and a segmented maximum is always a lower bound on the unsegmented one.
- Warm-up and starting point. A series that starts at its high and falls immediately is measured correctly; one that starts mid-recovery needs its warm-up included for the peak to mean anything.
What this calculator cannot tell you
- It is a historical maximum over the series you pasted, so it is a lower bound on what can happen. Extending the window can only make it larger or leave it unchanged — never smaller.
- It says nothing about probability. Two strategies with a 20% maximum drawdown are not equivalent if one reached it once in ten years and the other every eight months.
- It depends entirely on the inputs behind your equity curve: cost assumptions, position sizing and the period. A drawdown number without those qualifiers is not comparable to another one.
- It does not tell you whether you would have kept trading. That is the real question the number stands in for, and no calculator answers it.
The recovery arithmetic is the number worth remembering: a 50% drawdown needs a 100% gain to get back to the peak, and a 75% drawdown needs 300%. That asymmetry, not the percentage itself, is what makes a deep drawdown expensive in time.