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Pure Benchmarks · Free calculator

Stock Loss Recovery Calculator

Updated

Short answer

A loss needs a bigger gain to recover than the loss itself, because the gain starts from a smaller amount. After a 30% loss you need a 42.9% gain to get back to even; after a 50% loss you need 100%. At a steady 7% a year, recovering from a 30% loss takes about 5.3 years. Enter your own loss below.

How much gain to get back to even?

Gain needed to break even

42.9%

after a 30% loss

Time to recover

5.3 years

at 7% a year

Loss Gain needed to break even
-10% +11.1%
-20% +25%
-30% +42.9%
-40% +66.7%
-50% +100%

When an investment falls, the gain needed to get back to where you started is always larger than the percentage you lost. This calculator shows the exact gain needed for any loss and how long recovery takes at a return you choose. It runs in your browser and nothing you enter is stored. It describes arithmetic, not the future of any stock or fund.

Link your portfolio and every change you make is scored against the portfolio you would have kept, in dollars, so you can see which decisions helped and which cost you.

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Why a loss needs a bigger gain

If $10,000 falls 50% it becomes $5,000. A 50% gain on $5,000 only brings it to $7,500; it takes a 100% gain to get back to $10,000. The formula is gain needed = 1 ÷ (1 − loss) − 1, which is why the gap widens quickly as losses get deeper.

How long recovery takes

The time to recover depends on the return from here. At a steady yearly return r, recovery takes log(1 ÷ (1 − loss)) ÷ log(1 + r) years. Real returns are not steady, so treat the figure as a rough guide rather than a forecast.

An index is not a single stock

Broad indexes have recovered from every drop since 2018, the longest taking about two years after 2022. Single stocks are different: some never return to an earlier high. Whether a holding is likely to recover is a question about the business, not about the arithmetic on this page.

Measuring what you did about it

Holding, selling or adding after a loss are all decisions, and each can be measured. Pure Benchmarks, our own product, scores every change in a connected account against the portfolio you would have had without it, so you can see whether your response to a loss helped.

Link your portfolio and every change you make is scored against the portfolio you would have kept, in dollars, so you can see which decisions helped and which cost you.

See Your Free Benchmark Report

Frequently asked questions

How much do I need to gain to recover from a 20% loss?

25%. After a 20% loss, $10,000 becomes $8,000, and $8,000 needs to grow by $2,000, which is 25%, to return to $10,000.

How much gain do I need after a 50% loss?

100%. Half of the money is gone, so what remains has to double to get back to the starting amount.

How long does it take to recover from a loss?

It depends on the return from here. At a steady 7% a year, a 30% loss takes about 5.3 years to recover and a 50% loss about 10.2 years. The calculator shows the figure for your own numbers.

Should I sell a stock that is down a lot?

This page does not answer that for any holding. The useful question is whether you would buy the stock today at this price; the loss you already have does not change what it does next. This page is information, not a recommendation.

Keep exploring

See how a specific firm's advisor decisions compare to other firms:

New here? Read the portfolio benchmarking FAQ or the Pure Benchmarks blog.

This page is an information baseline for comparison only. It is not investment advice and not a recommendation to buy, sell, replace, or transfer any specific asset, account, or firm. Past performance does not guarantee future results. All figures shown are illustrative.