The Ultimate Guide to Recovering Investment Losses
Understanding Investment Fluctuations
When an investment's value fluctuates, the amount of money required to bring it back to its initial value is equal to the amount of change, but with the opposite sign. When expressed as a percentage, the gain and loss percentages will be different.
This is because the same dollar amount is being calculated as a percentage of two different initial amounts.
The formula is expressed as a change from the initial value to the final value.
Percentage change = ( Final value − Initial value ) / Initial value ∗ 100
Examples:
With a loss of 10%, one needs a gain of about 11% to recover. (A market correction)
With a loss of 20%, one needs a gain of 25% to recover. (A bear market)
With a loss of 30%, one needs a gain of about 43% to recover.
With a loss of 40%, one needs a gain of about 67% to recover.
With a loss of 50%, one needs a gain of 100% to recover. (If you lose half your money you need to double what you have left to get back to even.)
With a loss of 100%, you are starting over from zero. And remember, anything multiplied by zero is still zero.
As the plot graph showcase, after a percentage loss, the plot shows that you always need a larger percentage increase to come back to the same value
To understand this, we can look at the following example:
$1,000 = starting value
$900 = $1,000 - (10% of $1,000), a drop of 10%
$990 = $ 900 + (10% of $900), followed by a gain of 10%
The ending value of $990 is less than the starting value of $1,000.
Psychological Aspect
Investors should be able to mentally admit that they have incurred a loss, which is expected in trading.
The investor should give some time to heal the process and only keep a close watch on the market situation.
Huge losses incurred might disrupt the decision-making skill and stop trading for a few days until the confidence is regained.
There should be the right focus to approach the right opportunities, and there should not be any regrets of any loss during trading
