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Absolute Drawdown vs Percentage Drawdown

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 Saurabh Maloo, CFA, EM Rates Trader

 Monday, August 3, 2015

Which one is more credible to use while back-testing on short or long term data? Does one hold any significant upside over the other?


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2 comments on article "Absolute Drawdown vs Percentage Drawdown"

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 Rob Terpilowski, Software Architect

 Wednesday, August 5, 2015



I prefer to use percentage drawdown as it gives you a clearer picture as the account equity grows (or shrinks) in value.


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 Juan Manuel Gonzalez, Software Developer at TradeStation

 Tuesday, August 25, 2015



In my case I put extra attention to the Absolute Drawdown , its tells me for example that, if I start running the strategy live , in that exact moment I can go for a x$ amount of Drawdown, while if you see that in percentage it can be hard to see.

I explain more:

Suppose you start you backtest with a virtual capital of 10k , you run the backtest, the Absolute Drawdown is 10k , but on you backtest that happens after you grow in 80k ( you were having 100k), then you Percentage Drawdown can be close to 10% (not much), but has you can see, what happens if that Drawdown (the absolute one) happens at the beginning , 10k -10k. = 0k (its not 'OK' its zero 'k' :) ). I did not put to much care on the math but I hope you see my point.

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