Most trading products lead with the biggest number they own. Ours leads with the worst one. That is deliberate, and it costs us sales.
The number that decides everything
A strategy’s annual return tells you what happened. Its maximum drawdown tells you whether you would still have been holding it when it happened. Those are very different questions, and only the second one has anything to do with you.
Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic. A system that returns 60% a year with a 25% maximum drawdown will, at some point, show you a 25% loss. Not might — will. That is what “maximum drawdown” means: it already happened in the test. And when it happens live, it will not arrive labelled “this is the normal 25% drawdown, please hold.” It will arrive as three bad weeks that feel like the strategy is broken.
The traders who lose money on profitable systems are almost never the ones who picked a bad system. They are the ones who picked a system whose drawdown was larger than their patience.
Why the headline number is the wrong one
Return is the number a marketer optimises. Drawdown is the number an engineer optimises. We would rather sell you a 30% system you can hold for five years than a 90% system you will abandon in month four — because your actual return is the strategy’s return multiplied by how long you stayed in it, and most people’s multiplier is close to zero.
This is also why we publish recovery time alongside depth. A 15% drawdown that recovers in three weeks is an inconvenience. A 15% drawdown that grinds sideways for eight months is a test of character. The depth is identical; the experience is not.
What we ask you to do with it
Before you run anything of ours, do this: take the published maximum drawdown, apply it to the account you are about to fund, and write the dollar figure down. Not the percentage — the dollar figure. Then ask whether you would keep the EA running the day you see it.
If the answer is no, you do not need a different strategy. You need a smaller position size. Halve it and do the sum again.
That single exercise prevents more losses than any filter we could code.
The version we do not show
There is one more reason we lead with drawdown. It keeps us honest. It is easy to tune a strategy until the equity curve is beautiful, and every one of those tunings quietly makes the drawdown worse in ways that only appear later, on data the optimiser never saw. Publishing the ugly number first means we have to look at it first — every release, before we decide anything else.
A result that looks too good is not a success. It is a bug we have not found yet.