The worst stretch your account has actually had
Paste your equity curve or drop in a CSV. You get max drawdown in percent and in currency, how long the longest one lasted, and how deep you are in one right now. Nothing leaves your browser.
Max Drawdown Calculator
Paste an equity curve or upload a CSV. Nothing is uploaded anywhere - the file is read in your browser.
The last number on each row is taken as the equity value, so a date,balance export works without editing.
The formula
- running peak = highest equity seen up to that point
- drawdown = (peak - equity) / peak
- max drawdown = the largest drawdown over the whole curve
- current drawdown = drawdown measured at the final point
- duration = points between a peak and the recovery back to it
What max drawdown measures, and what it does not
Max drawdown is the largest peak-to-trough fall your account balance has taken over a period. It is measured against a running high-water mark: every time the balance sets a new high, the reference point moves up with it, and the drawdown is how far below that mark you subsequently fell. Expressed as a percentage, it answers a question a return figure cannot: what was the worst it got. Two accounts that both finished the year up 30 percent are not equivalent if one drew down 8 percent along the way and the other drew down 45 percent. The second one was a materially different experience to live through, and a materially riskier system, even though the end points match. It is worth being clear about what this figure does not tell you. It is a historical maximum, not a limit. A system that has never drawn down more than 12 percent has not proved that it cannot draw down 30. It has only proved that the market has not yet presented the conditions that would do it.
Duration is the part that ends careers
Depth gets the attention, but duration is usually what does the real damage. A 20 percent drawdown recovered in three weeks is survivable. The same 20 percent that takes eleven months to recover is where traders abandon a working system, double their size trying to force a recovery, or quit outright. That is why this calculator reports the longest drawdown alongside the deepest, measured as the number of data points between a peak and the moment that peak was regained. If a drawdown is still open at the end of your data, it is measured to the last point, because an unrecovered drawdown is not a shorter one. When you read the result, be honest about what a point represents in your data. If your curve is daily, a 60-point drawdown is three trading months of watching an account sit below where it once was. Most people underestimate how that feels until they read the number.
How to get an equity curve out of your broker
Any list of balances over time works. Most brokers will export an account value history as CSV; Schwab and Interactive Brokers both do. If your export has dates in the first column and balances in the second, paste it in as-is - this tool takes the last number on each row, so a date,balance format needs no editing. If you only have a trade log, you can build a curve by starting at your opening balance and adding each closed trade's P&L in sequence. That version measures drawdown on closed trades only and will look milder than reality, because it ignores the open losses you sat through before closing. If you want the honest number, use account values rather than realised P&L. The calculation runs entirely in your browser: nothing you paste or upload is sent anywhere.
Frequently asked questions
There is no single answer, but as a reference point, professionally managed strategies are commonly designed around a 10 to 20 percent maximum. Individual discretionary traders often run considerably deeper, and drawdowns above 30 percent are a strong signal that position sizing rather than strategy selection is the thing to fix, because recovering from a 30 percent loss requires a 43 percent gain.
Account value. Measuring on closed trades only counts the losses you chose to realise, which systematically understates the depth of what you actually experienced - an open position sitting 15 percent underwater is a real drawdown whether or not you closed it.
Max drawdown is the worst it has ever been across the whole curve. Current drawdown is how far below your all-time high you are right now. If they are the same number, you are sitting at the bottom of the worst stretch you have had, which is exactly when the temptation to change everything is strongest and usually wrong.
Not on its own. A drawdown figure only means something next to the return that produced it and the length of the sample. A 3 percent max drawdown over eleven trades tells you nothing. The same figure over four years of active trading tells you a great deal.
See your drawdown without exporting anything
TraderLog syncs your Schwab or Interactive Brokers account and keeps the equity curve, max drawdown and recovery time updated as you trade, so the number is there on the days you would rather not go looking for it.