How long the hole lasts: 7 of 22 audits never repaired their deepest drawdown

A drawdown figure says how deep an account went and nothing about how long it stayed there. Lizard has a deepest end of day drawdown of 2.55%, which reads like something anybody could sit through. The high it measures from is the deposit itself on 2003.05.09, the weekday before the first close; the account bottomed out on 2007.11.08 and did not see that level again until 2026.06.18. The counter between those two dates reads 6,029 days, and every one of them was spent holding an account worth less than it had already been.

What the counter actually counts

The episode table is built from one balance value per weekday. Our engine takes each closed trade, writes the account balance on the day that trade closed, then walks the calendar from the deposit, entered on the weekday before the first close, to the last closing day. It keeps Monday to Friday, carries the last known balance across the quiet days, moves a weekend close into the following Monday and keeps the final day even when it falls on a weekend, so a loss on the very first trading day is part of the series. An episode begins at a peak in that series, runs to the lowest point that follows and ends on the day the balance touches the old peak again. The deepest episode reproduces the maximum end of day drawdown of the same audit, which is the self consistency check the engine states inside the table.

Two properties decide how the duration should be read. The field is labelled in trading days and the counter runs on weekdays, so a public holiday counts and a week without a single trade counts. And when an episode never recovers the counter simply stops at the end of the run, which makes that number a floor rather than a total.

One more thing belongs in front of the figures. The balance series behind these episodes already carries our commission retrofit while the tester head does not, because the retrofit is applied to the deals before the daily series is built. Scalping Robot Pro shows the seam. Its deepest episode bottoms out at 46,765.32 USD and the retrofit line of the same audit reports a final balance of 46,765.32 USD.

Deep and long are separate questions

Twister Pro Scalper holds the second longest repair among the 22 deepest episodes, behind Lizard. Its own is worth 114.74 USD or 0.11% of the account, it started on 2012.07.16, reached bottom on 2015.05.22 and closed on 2024.10.08. That is 3,191 days under water for a hole of just over a tenth of a percent, across 113 trades of which 25 lost.

The two orderings come apart inside single audits as well. In 8 of the 22 the deepest of the three stored episodes is not the longest of them. Thundergold Scalper is the clearest case. Its deepest hole is 31.79 USD and closed after 346 days, while the episode ranked second at 30.41 USD opened on 2013.06.25, reached bottom on 2022.03.07 and did not close until 2024.04.12, which is 2,818 days for a difference in depth of 1.38 USD.

Logan is the opposite shape. Its deepest episode is a single step in the series, from a peak of 100,636.82 USD on 2016.12.08 to 70,388.88 USD on 2016.12.09, which is 30,247.94 USD or 30.06% of the account. Exactly 20 trades closed inside that step and all 20 of them lost. That run holds at most 20 long positions at the same time and adds against the move in 285 of its entries, so a single closing basket moves the whole balance line. The run then ended 2,524 days later without ever regaining the high, and its 1,372 trades leave a final balance of 75,665.35 USD after our commission retrofit.

The seven that never came back

In 7 of the 22 audits with an episode table the deepest episode carries no recovery date. Two of them are young rather than broken. Gold Atlas was 70 days into a hole of 501.15 USD when the window closed and Prop Firm Gold EA was 69 days into one of 683.08 USD. Both counters were still running on the last day of the test, so both figures are floors.

Two others are terminal. Scalping Robot Pro's peak is its 100,000 USD deposit on 2003.05.14, the weekday before its first close, and it hit its lowest point on the last day its balance series has, 6,066 days later and 53,234.68 USD lower, with 302,798 trades closed inside that one episode. Smart Gold Hunter peaked at its deposit on 2003.05.05 and stayed below that level for 6,072 days, which is the entire remainder of its run. The other three are Adaptive Gold Scalper at 2,720 days, Logan at 2,524 and OilVector X at 740.

The seven counts only the deepest episode of each audit. Widen it to the three episodes every audit stores and 10 of the 22 hold one that never recovered, which adds CryonX EA at 142 days, Gold House at 22 and Gold Trade Pro at 85. An episode can only stay open at the very end of a run, so each of those ten runs finished below a high it had already made. Ten is a floor too, because an audit stores its three deepest episodes and a shallow open one is simply not in the file.

One episode is a diagnosis

Three of the 22 runs carry exactly one episode over the whole test. That is not evidence of a calm account. An episode only ends when the balance reaches its old peak, so a run with a single episode is a run whose balance never returned to a level it had left. Logan, Scalping Robot Pro and Smart Gold Hunter are those three and all three also sit in the group of seven above. Their shapes differ completely. Smart Gold Hunter's peak is its deposit on 2003.05.05, the day the window opens, and it never beat it. Logan traded from its first entry on 2008.09.18 until 2016.12.08 before one basket took the account down. Scalping Robot Pro fell from its deposit, nine days into the window, to the last day its series holds.

The count runs the other way as well. CryonX EA records 355 episodes and Gold House 354, so the balance of those runs dipped below a running high that many times. The deepest of the CryonX dips is worth 184.66 USD and was repaired in 339 days. A high episode count and a low one describe two different lives, and neither is a verdict on its own.

Run these checks yourself

• Ask for the recovery date, not only the drawdown percent. A vendor who shows 2.55% is showing depth. Lizard needed until 2026.06.18 to leave that hole.
• Treat an open episode as a floor. Gold Atlas at 70 days and Prop Firm Gold EA at 69 days were still falling when the test ended, so those numbers can only grow.
• Count the trades inside the hole. Logan lost 30,247.94 USD across 20 closings on one day, which is a basket being cleared rather than a losing streak.
• Match the duration against your own patience. Four of the 22 runs stayed below an old high for more than 3,000 days, and nobody watches an account do that without asking why.

Every audit page prints its episode table with the peak, the trough, the recovery and the trades closed in between. Your own tester report? The browser check is free.