The psychology of drawdown: at what % loss do most traders abandon a winning strategy?

Here's something that's been bugging me lately.

There are strategies out there with a genuine edge — backtested, forward-tested, profitable over hundreds of trades. And yet most people who start using them will quit before ever seeing the results.

Not because the strategy stopped working. Because their brain told them to stop.

I've been digging into this and the research is pretty wild:

A study from Barber & Odean (the UC Davis guys who've been studying retail trader behavior for decades) found that individual investors overwhelmingly sell winners too early and hold losers too long. Classic disposition effect. But what's less talked about is what happens at the strategy level, not individual positions, but when someone abandons an entire approach.

From what I've seen (both in data and watching real traders), there's a pretty consistent breaking point:

• ~15-20% drawdown: This is where doubt creeps in. Most traders start googling for a "better" strategy. They're not panicking yet, but they're shopping.
• ~25-30% drawdown: This is the kill zone. The vast majority of people bail here, even if the strategy's max historical drawdown was 35% and they knew that going in.
• ~40%+: At this point almost nobody is left. The ones still holding are either dead inside or have actual conviction built on deep understanding of why the edge exists.

The cruel irony? Many of these strategies recover. The people who quit at -28% miss the snapback to new highs. Then they see the strategy working again, FOMO back in near the top, and repeat the cycle.

I think the core issue is that knowing a drawdown is possible and living through one are completely different psychological experiences. You can tell someone "this strategy has a max drawdown of 35%" and they'll nod and say "yeah I can handle that." No they can't. Almost nobody can, unless they've done serious work on their process.

A few things I think actually help:

1. Size down to where the drawdown is boring. If a 30% drawdown on your strategy means you lose $600 instead of $60,000, you'll actually stick with it. Most people over-leverage specifically because the strategy "works" then get shaken out when it temporarily doesn't.
2. Track the strategy even when you're not trading it. Paper track it through the drawdown. Watching a recovery you didn't participate in is painful, but it builds real conviction for next time.
3. Separate the strategy from your P&L emotionally. Easier said than done, but the traders I know who last longest treat strategies like employees. Sometimes an employee has a bad quarter. You don't fire someone with a 5-year track record over one bad quarter.
4. Have verified data you actually trust. This is the big one for me. If you're following someone's "strategy" but you have no way to verify their actual results... of course you'll bail at the first sign of trouble. You were never really confident in it to begin with. You were confident in the marketing.

That last point is honestly why I think most trading "education" fails people. They sell you a strategy with a cherry-picked equity curve, you hit the first inevitable rough patch, and you have zero foundation to fall back on because the results were never real to begin with.

Curious what your experience has been. At what point in a drawdown do you start questioning everything? And has anyone here actually held through a major drawdown and come out the other side?