Let's say you make a bad move, you invest in something that causes you to lose 10%, 30% or even 50%. How much do you need to make back percentage wise in order to recover the loss you suffered? It's not as easy as most people think as the new value affects how the percentage value change affects you. Well let's take a look.
First let's start with an easy example. You have a pizza with 5 slices. You take one slice, how many slices have you lost? 1 slice. You want to recover your pizza lost, how many slices do you need? Same as lost, 1 slice.
Now we convert this over to percentage, firstly, how much pizza did you lose when you took one slice? You lost 1/5th or 20%. The slice you need to recover doesn't account for the same percentage, the total value has changed, you now have four slices. This means that your one slice, or 1/4th, accounts for 25% of the new total. So in losing, let's say, 20% on ethereum. You need to recover 25% of that new price to recoup your loss.
Take this approach with any change in percent, think of it in slices if it helps. Doing this approach to if you lose 50% or 1/2th makes the new total 1/1, meaning you need 100% to recover your loss. 10% loss means that you have lost 1/10 and the new total is 9/9 meaning you need 1/9th or 11,11% and so on.
I've put together a table quickly showing how much you need.
This might seem fairly easy in hindsight, or even prior as you may have already known this. I decided to put this together as there are an alarming number of people that don't realize this. The more you lose the harder it is to recover, and the percentage needed grows to really large numbers the more you lose.
Take care and try to go for profits instead of losses.
