Gold EA drawdown: how to read it
Drawdown is how far an account fell from its last high before it recovered. It tells you how much pain a strategy needed to make its gain.
What drawdown is
If an account grew to 10,000 and then fell to 7,000, the drawdown is 30%. Return tells you what you might win; drawdown tells you what you must be able to sit through.
Three kinds you will see
- Closed (balance) drawdown: counts only closed trades. It can look small while losing trades are still open.
- Equity drawdown: includes open trades at their current price. This is the money you would really have if you closed everything at that moment.
- Floating drawdown: the open loss right now. Grid and martingale EAs often show a calm closed curve and a deep floating loss.
On our leaderboard, “Max float DD” is the worst open loss we saw, and “Max DD” in the Record tab comes from closed daily results. They are different numbers on purpose.
Why gain without drawdown means little
A +200% gain with a 90% drawdown and a +40% gain with a 10% drawdown are very different. The first came close to losing everything. Always read return and drawdown together. We show the drawdown next to every return, including our own: our Sirius model is +262.36% with a max drawdown of 48.82% (once, 29 Dec 2025, a thin holiday market).
How much drawdown is “acceptable”?
There is no safe number. It depends on how much of your money you can lose without changing your life. Ask three questions:
- What is the worst drawdown so far, and which kind is it (closed, equity or floating)?
- How long did it take to recover?
- Is the track record long enough? A few weeks with no drawdown proves very little.
Red flags
- Only closed-trade results; no equity or floating numbers.
- A very smooth upward curve with many open trades.
- A track record shorter than a few months, or only a backtest.
- Results shown as screenshots, not a live link.
Check it yourself
Look for a live, read-only record: the account’s own trades, sent by the platform, with equity drawdown visible. You can publish your own MT4/MT5 account the same way with our free AT Reporter. More: How to check an EA track record.