---
title: "Longest recovery"
description: "Longest recovery is the longest span a strategy took to climb from a trough back to its prior peak — duration measured from the bottom, not from the peak."
canonical_url: "https://fincanva.com/docs/analysis/longest-recovery"
last_updated: "2026-09-17"
md_url: "https://fincanva.com/docs/analysis/longest-recovery.md"
---

# Longest recovery

Longest recovery is the longest stretch of time a strategy took to climb from a trough back to its prior peak — the count starts at the bottom of a fall and ends when the value reaches the old high again. It answers "once it had stopped falling, how long did getting back take?", and it is measured **from the bottom, not from the peak**.

**Also seen as:** recovery time, time to get back to the high

## How is longest recovery different from longest drawdown?

Longest recovery covers only the climb back up; [longest drawdown](/docs/analysis/longest-drawdown) covers the fall *and* the climb. Both end at the same moment — the return to the old peak — but they start in different places, which is why the same episode produces two different numbers.

| Measure | Starts at | Ends at |
|---|---|---|
| **Longest drawdown** | the old peak, when the value first drops below it | the moment the value reaches that old peak again |
| **Longest recovery** | the trough, the lowest point of the fall | the moment the value reaches that old peak again |

For a single episode, longest recovery is therefore the shorter of the two. Confusing them is the most common mistake with this pair: a "9-month recovery" and a "14-month drawdown" can be the same event, seen from the bottom and from the top.

## What if the strategy never climbs back before the backtest ends?

**Read this before you read the chart.** If the value is still below its prior peak on the last simulated day, the climb is not discarded and it is not left open. It is **cut off at the last simulated bar** and counted from the trough to that bar — and that truncated climb competes for the maximum like any other, so it can be the number the page reports as the longest recovery.

The hazard is the same one the [longest drawdown](/docs/analysis/longest-drawdown#what-if-the-strategy-never-recovers-before-the-backtest-ends) page warns about, and it bites harder here: **a climb that was still under way when the data ran out looks exactly like one that finished at the old high.** The figure does not say "still recovering"; it just reports a duration. A reader will take it as the time the strategy needed to get back. It may be the time the strategy had spent trying when the backtest stopped.

So the reported figure is a **lower bound** on that episode: run the backtest longer and the same climb could only have taken the same time or more. If the equity curve ends below its highest point, the final recovery is truncated, and the longest-recovery figure may belong to a climb that never reached the peak at all.

## Defaults in Fincanva

- The metrics table shows it in the **Drawdown** group as the row **Longest recovery (months)**.
- It uses the same duration format as longest drawdown — a bare one-decimal number for 12 months or fewer, `2y` for exact years, `1y 2m` otherwise. See [how these durations are displayed](/docs/analysis/longest-drawdown#how-are-these-durations-displayed).
- Unlike longest drawdown, longest recovery appears in the metrics table only — it has no KPI card on the metrics view.
- It is measured over the whole backtest window, so it is not comparable across runs of different lengths.

## Worked example

A strategy peaks, falls for five months to its trough, then takes nine months to climb from that trough back to the old peak. Its longest recovery for the episode is 9 months.

The same episode's [longest drawdown](/docs/analysis/longest-drawdown) is 14 months — the five months of falling plus the nine months of climbing. Same event, two figures: 9 months of recovery sits inside 14 months below the peak.

## What counts as a good value?

A shorter longest recovery means that, once a fall had bottomed out, the strategy needed less time to get back to its previous high. Like longest drawdown it describes **duration only**: it says nothing about how far the value fell, which is [max drawdown](/docs/analysis/max-drawdown), nor how much return the strategy earned for that worst fall, which is the [return-to-drawdown ratio](/docs/analysis/return-to-drawdown-ratio).

A shallow fall can still take a long time to recover, and a deep fall can be undone quickly — the pairing of depth and duration is what the two readings together describe, and neither one ranks strategies on its own.

*These figures describe what a strategy would have done on historical data, not what it will do. Fincanva provides no financial advice — see [Is this financial advice?](/docs/investing-theory/is-this-financial-advice).*