Recovery Factor Calculator: How Fast Does Your Strategy Bounce Back?

Calculate Recovery Factor from your TradingView backtest CSV. Net profit divided by max drawdown. Free, client-side, no signup needed.

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What Is Recovery Factor?

Recovery Factor measures how much money a strategy earns for every dollar it lost in its worst drawdown. It is the ratio of total net profit to the maximum peak-to-trough drawdown.

Think of it as a payout ratio for risk. If your strategy went through a 20% drawdown but ended up with 100% total net profit, the Recovery Factor is 5. That means the strategy earned five times what it gave back at its worst moment. A Recovery Factor below 1 means the strategy never fully recovered from its worst drawdown.

Formula

Recovery Factor = Total Net Profit / Max Drawdown Where: Total Net Profit = Gross Profit - Gross Loss (the final account gain) Max Drawdown = The largest peak-to-trough decline in the equity curve (as a positive number, e.g. 0.20 for 20%) If net profit is 18,000 and max drawdown is 6,000: Recovery Factor = 18,000 / 6,000 = 3.0. This works in both currency units and percentage terms, as long as both inputs use the same unit.

How to Read This Number

Higher is better. A Recovery Factor above 5 is strong. The strategy earns more than five times its worst drawdown. Between 3 and 5 is good. Between 2 and 3 is okay but worth scrutiny. Below 2 is weak. The strategy does not earn enough relative to the risk it took.

The critical nuance: Recovery Factor depends entirely on where the max drawdown happens. Two strategies with the same total net profit can have vastly different Recovery Factors because one hit a deep drawdown early and the other hit it late. That makes it a backward-looking measure. A single bad trade sequence can pull the entire number down.

What Counts as Good?

RangeValueWhat It Means
Strong5.0+The strategy earns more than 5 times its worst drawdown. High capital efficiency. Often signals a strategy with small, quick drawdowns and steady gains.
Good3.0 - 5.0Solid risk-adjusted performance. The strategy earns 3 to 5 times the worst drawdown. Most professional strategies target at least this range.
OK2.0 - 3.0Acceptable but requires caution. The strategy earns 2 to 3 times its worst drawdown. Check whether the max drawdown happened recently or long ago.
WeakBelow 2.0The strategy does not earn enough relative to its worst loss. A Recovery Factor below 1 means the strategy never fully recovered from its worst drawdown.

How Pineify Calculates Recovery Factor

What I appreciate about calculating Recovery Factor from a full trade list rather than from a summary report is that you see the exact interplay between profits and the worst drawdown. When I first uploaded my own TradingView backtest CSV to Pineify, I was surprised to see the Recovery Factor was 1.8 on a strategy I thought was good. The max drawdown was 23%, and total net profit was only 41%. The number did not lie. That single metric made me stop trading a system I had spent three months developing. Pineify calculates Recovery Factor automatically from the complete equity curve reconstructed from your CSV. You do not need to dig up your max drawdown number separately. The tool also plots the max drawdown on the equity curve so you can see exactly which trade caused the worst drawdown and how the Recovery Factor evolved over time. No spreadsheets, no manual formulas.

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