6 MIN READ / UPDATED 31 AUGUST 2026

What is a good maximum drawdown for a copy trader

Drawdown is the one leaderboard number that tells you what the bad month actually felt like.

What drawdown measures

Maximum drawdown is the deepest fall from a peak to the trough that follows it. It carries a minus sign: -22%.

Return tells you where the trader arrived. Drawdown tells you what you would have had to sit through on the way.

One of those two numbers decides whether you are still copying in month five. It is not the return.

-10% looks comfortable and often just means the record is short. -45% is routine for a fund and unbearable for a beginner with 2,000.

So the useful question is not whether -35% is good. It is whether you would still be copying at -35%.

Their worst drawdown	What it asks of you
-10% to -15%	One uncomfortable month. Most people hold without a written rule.
-20% to -30%	Several months underwater. This is where most beginners quit, at the bottom.
-40% and deeper	Either a written stop, or an exit decided by how you felt that evening.

Scroll the table sideways to read every column

A -8% maximum drawdown over 3 months tells you almost nothing. That trader has not met a bad market yet.

12 months is a floor. 24 months containing one real drawdown is evidence. Under 6 months is a sample, not a record.

Short records flatter every metric at once, which is exactly why new profiles climb leaderboards.

You copy with a share of your capital, you join mid-curve, and you may stop early. Their -20% can easily be your -32%.

Fees, slippage, minimum position sizes and the date you started all move your number away from the published one.

The drawdown that matters is measured on your account, in your own log, against a stop you wrote yourself.

The stop is one sentence. At -15% on my copy account, I stop copying and review before I fund anything again.

A stop written after the drawdown starts is not a rule. It is a negotiation, and the losing side is holding the pen.