How much gain you need to bring your remaining investment back to original. If your answer is 50% then it is wrong because 50% of $50,000 (account equity after drawdown) is only $25,000 and that would take your account back to only $75,000. You would still be behind $25,000 from your initial investment. So the correct answer is 100%, that is, you will need a 100% return of the remaining $50,000 to bring your remaining investment back to the original position. In summary this simple example demonstrates that if you have lost 50% of your investment in this case then you need 100% gain to restore the financial position of your account to the original position.
The picture below is worth a thousand words and explains the concept very clearly for those of us that are more visually gifted. As you can see the S&P 500 has suffered relatively large drawdowns over the last ten years -49% and -57% from March of 2000 to October of 2002 and from October 2007 to March of 2009 respectively. Since no one has a crystal ball we do not know what the peak or trough (top or bottom) will be until it is behind us.
Big drawdowns can take a long time to recover one's account back to the original principal amount. It took almost five years (5 years!) to recover from the drawdown of the the S&P500 after the dot com bubble and we have not fully recovered from the drawdown in the S&P 500 that bottomed out in March of 2009.
It is this reason that active risk management is critical to long term success when it comes to investing. Many of us (especially retirees) do not have five years to wait for our investments to get back to breakeven. There is also the lost opportunity of time with respect to the compounding the growth of capital and not just compounding the the capital to get back to even.
Drawdown can be thought of in simple terms as one's pain threshold. If you have $10,000 and it dropped to $8,000 (20%) would you still be able to sleep at night? What if you opened your statement and it $5,000 (50% drawdown) in equity value? As drawdown is a percentage based measure that one can directly associate with their investment account value it provides a meaningful sense of the risk one is willing to accept. Since we have all lived through two drawdowns of approximately 50% in the last ten years when looking at the S&P 500 we know what it feels like and how long it has taken to recover. When looking at investments be sure to consider drawdown.
Disclaimers: Drawdown is a measurement tool, but is not the only risk measurement tool. Historical drawdowns of and investment, index or strategy do not necissarly represent future drawdowns, performance or offer predictive value for what may happen in the future. No one on the planet has a crystal ball or can say that low drawdown or high drawn investment will continue to operate in the exact same manner.
Shout if from the mountain tops.
What's the right portfolio for you or your clients? Provident Capital offers 4 portfolios that one can select that seek to replicate the risk and return characteristics of our Absolute Indexes. 
