← All tools
Losing streak calculator
Every strategy has losing streaks. Enter your risk per trade and a run of losses to see how deep the drawdown gets and how much you'd need to make back.
%
Up to 100
| Risk per trade | Account left | Gain to recover |
|---|---|---|
| 0.5% | 95.1% | +5.1% |
| 1% | 90.4% | +10.6% |
| 2% | 81.7% | +22.4% |
| 3% | 73.7% | +35.6% |
| 5% | 59.9% | +67.0% |
| 10% | 34.9% | +186.8% |
Account left after 10 losses81.7%
Drawdown−18.3%
Gain needed to recover+22.4%
Show as table
| Losses | Account left |
|---|---|
| Start | 100.0% |
| 1 loss | 98.0% |
| 2 losses | 96.0% |
| 3 losses | 94.1% |
| 4 losses | 92.2% |
| 5 losses | 90.4% |
| 6 losses | 88.6% |
| 7 losses | 86.8% |
| 8 losses | 85.1% |
| 9 losses | 83.4% |
| 10 losses | 81.7% |
How it’s calculated
Each loss costs your risk % of the balance at that moment, because the next trade is sized from the smaller balance:
Account left = (1 − risk %)losses
Gain to recover = 1 ÷ account left − 1
Why the recovery is always bigger than the loss
After losing 20% you have 80% left, and 80% has to grow by 25% to get back to 100%. The deeper the drawdown, the faster this gets out of hand: a 50% drawdown needs a 100% gain.
How long can a losing streak be?
Longer than most people expect. With a 50% win rate, runs of 6 or 7 losses turn up regularly over a few hundred trades, and strategies that win less often see longer ones. Pick a risk per trade that you could live with through a streak like that, and stick to it.