Time Under Water | Gale Finance

Also known as:: drawdown duration, recovery time, time to recover, drawdown recovery, underwater period, drawdown length

Time under water is the duration of a drawdown — how long an investment stays below a previous high.

Max drawdown tells you how deep the worst drop was. Time under water tells you how long the pain lasted.

Peak-to-recovery vs trough-to-recovery

There are two related “duration” ideas people mix together:

Time under water (peak → recovery): time from the prior peak until the price gets back to (or above) that peak.
Recovery time (trough → recovery): time from the drawdown low (the trough) until the price gets back to (or above) the prior peak.

Both matter. A deep drawdown that recovers quickly can be easier to stomach than a shallow drawdown that drags on for years.

On compare pages and scorecards, when we show “Recovered in X days” / “It took X days to recover,” we mean:

Calendar days from trough to recovery for the max-drawdown event in the analysis window.

If the series doesn’t recover to its prior peak within the window, we say so.

For depth, see maximum drawdown. For a metric that blends depth and duration, see Ulcer Index.