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The deepest hole your portfolio ever climbed out of — or the one it never escaped.
Maximum drawdown is the largest percentage decline from any peak to any subsequent trough in a portfolio's history. A portfolio that hit $100k, fell to $55k, then recovered to $90k has a max drawdown of −45%, regardless of recovery. It is the single most important psychological risk metric — investors typically capitulate somewhere between −20% and −30%.
MaxDD = min over t of [V(t) / max(V(s) for s ≤ t) − 1]MaxDD = mint [Vt / max(Vs for s ≤ t) − 1]You walk forward through time, keeping track of the highest portfolio value seen so far. At every step you compute "how far below that running maximum am I right now?" The worst value over the whole history is your maximum drawdown.
Standard deviation says "your returns wobble." Max drawdown says "this is the actual size of the hole you sat at the bottom of." For an investor with hard liquidity constraints (retirement, leverage, margin), max drawdown is the metric that determines whether you got wiped out, not Sharpe ratio.
Historical S&P 500 max drawdowns: −86% (1929–32 Great Depression), −54% (2007–09 GFC), −49% (2000–02 dot-com), −34% (Mar 2020 COVID, recovered fast), −25% (2022). Most retail investors capitulate somewhere around −25% to −35% and lock the loss in permanently.
Your portfolio path over 4 years:
Max drawdown = (84,000 / 140,000) − 1 = −40%
It does not matter that you later recovered to $160k. The deepest underwater point relative to its preceding peak was −40%, and that is the number that would have caused most investors to bail.
Max drawdown depends entirely on the asset class. Use this as a sanity check against your portfolio mix:
| Portfolio type | Typical max DD over a market cycle |
|---|---|
| Cash / T-bills | 0% to −1% |
| Short-term bonds | −3% to −8% |
| 60/40 balanced | −25% to −35% |
| S&P 500 | −35% to −55% across most decades |
| Concentrated growth equities | −50% to −75% |
| Single-stock concentrated | −80% to −95% |
| Crypto (BTC) | −80% to −85% |
| Altcoins | −95%+ |
Upload a brokerage CSV (IBKR, Schwab, Fidelity, Robinhood, Coinbase, Kraken, Binance…) and get your Maximum Drawdown computed on your real holdings — alongside 70+ other portfolio metrics. No signup, runs in your browser.
Open the Max Drawdown Analyzer →Drawdown · Calmar Ratio · Ulcer Index · CDaR (Conditional Drawdown at Risk) · Recovery Factor
Depends on the asset. For an S&P 500 portfolio, anything better than −35% across a market cycle is good. For pure crypto, better than −80% is normal.
For the S&P 500: GFC drawdown took 5.5 years to fully recover (Oct 2007 peak to Mar 2013); dot-com drawdown took 7 years; COVID drawdown took 5 months; 1929 crash took 25 years (in real terms even longer).
Drawdown is the percent decline from the running peak at any single point. Maximum drawdown is the worst such value over the entire history.
On the full daily-priced portfolio value series, with dividends and splits reinvested. We use actual daily closes for every ticker in your upload, not month-end approximations.
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