What is one percent of your account, really?
Percentages are easy to agree to and hard to feel. This turns your risk rule into the three numbers that matter: what one trade can cost, what a bad day can cost, and how long a losing streak takes to hurt.
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Why the recovery number is the one to look at
Drawdowns are not symmetrical, and this is the single most useful piece of arithmetic in trading. Lose 10% and you need 11.1% to get back. Lose 25% and you need 33%. Lose 50% and you need 100% — you have to double what is left simply to return to where you began.
| Drawdown | Gain needed to recover |
|---|---|
| 5% | 5.3% |
| 10% | 11.1% |
| 20% | 25.0% |
| 33% | 49.3% |
| 50% | 100.0% |
| 75% | 300.0% |
This is why the risk percentage matters more than the win rate. A modest edge survives a small risk percentage almost indefinitely. The same edge with a large one gets wiped out by an ordinary losing streak that would otherwise have been survivable.
Losing streaks are more common than they feel
If you win half your trades, a run of five losses is not unusual — over a hundred trades you should expect to see one. A run of seven is unremarkable over a few hundred. Nothing has gone wrong when it happens; it is what a coin does. The question the calculator answers is whether your account survives the streak with enough left to keep trading it.
The daily stop
A per-trade limit alone does not protect you from the day where you take six trades in a row while annoyed. That is what the max-trades number above is for. A daily loss limit is a circuit breaker, and it works because it is decided in advance, when you are calm, rather than at 11am when you are not.
Whether you set it at two trades or five is your call. What the arithmetic shows is that a daily stop of more than about 3% of the account makes a single bad session cost you weeks.
Common questions
Should risk percent be fixed or scale with the setup?
Both approaches are widely used. A fixed percentage is simpler and harder to talk yourself out of. A tiered one — smaller on marginal setups, larger on the ones that meet every criterion — is what most discretionary traders drift toward, and it only works if the tiers are written down before the day starts rather than decided in the moment.
Does this account for correlated positions?
No, and that is a real limitation. Three positions in the same sector on the same catalyst are close to one position with three times the size. If your names move together, add the risk up and treat it as a single trade.
Is anything stored?
No. No server call, no cookie, no storage, no analytics event carrying these figures. It is all arithmetic in your browser and you can verify that in the network tab.
The rest of the set
All free, all in-browser, none of them ask for an email to work.