OXY's worst trade lost 28 percent. The account's drawdown was 4 percent

OXY's worst single trade under ADX trend breakout lost 28.05 percent. The same 26-trade record's maximum drawdown, the worst peak-to-trough decline across the whole sequence, was 4.31 percent. Both figures come from the same ticker, the same strategy, the same ten-year run. A single trade losing more than six times what the account itself ever gave back sounds like a contradiction. It is not, and the study's own written rules say exactly why.

The rule that explains the gap

ADX trend breakout's own published rule is specific about sizing: on entry, measure the 14 period ATR, place a stop 2 ATR below entry, and size the position so that hitting that stop loses exactly 1 percent of account equity. A stock with a wide ATR gets fewer shares. A stock with a narrow ATR gets more. Tenachine's worked example on sizing from a stop walks through the same formula on a different study, turtle 55 breakout, and finds a 50,000 dollar account buying 78 shares of a 120 dollar stock to keep a 2 ATR stop at exactly 500 dollars of risk. The same arithmetic applies here: OXY's position was sized small enough, in shares, that even a price move far worse than the intended stop only cost the account a few percent, not the 28.05 percent the position itself moved against.

The worst_trade_pct figure and the max_drawdown_pct figure are not measuring the same thing, and that is the whole explanation. Worst trade is the raw price return on that one position, entry to exit, with no reference to how much of the account was actually riding on it. Maximum drawdown is a measurement of the account's own equity curve, shares times price, compounded across every trade in sequence. A position sized down specifically because the stock was volatile can lose a third of its own value in price terms and still barely register on the account. Tenachine does not publish which trade produced OXY's worst return or exactly when it closed relative to the study's other 25 trades, so this is not a claim that this specific trade alone set the 4.31 percent drawdown. It is a claim about the mechanism that keeps the two numbers from having to match, and the published sizing rule is direct evidence for it.

A ticker where the two numbers land almost on top of each other

SYY under dual momentum 12 minus 1 shows the opposite pattern. Its worst single trade lost 5.2231 percent. The strategy's maximum drawdown on that ticker was 5.2182 percent, a difference of five thousandths of a point, close enough to call the same number. Dual momentum 12 minus 1 uses the identical sizing rule as ADX trend breakout, the same 2 ATR stop sized to 1 percent of equity, published in its own written spec. The sizing formula did not fail to cushion SYY the way it cushioned OXY. What differs is the rest of the record around it: SYY completed only 12 trades over the decade, its best trade was 2.9331 percent, and its win rate was 41.67 percent, a thin, mostly-losing record with little else to offset one bad trade. Twenty six trades gave OXY's account more room for other results to sit around its worst one. Twelve gave SYY less.

Neither ticker's result is a flaw in the sizing rule. A 1 percent equity risk formula does one job: it fixes how much a single stop-out is expected to cost, based on the ATR measured at entry. It says nothing about what happens if the price keeps moving after that stop level is crossed, whether from a gap, from the strategy's own early-exit rule for a weakening ADX reading, or from the 40-trading-day timeout closing the position later than a hard stop would have. OXY's 28.05 percent worst trade is evidence the price moved well past where the 2 ATR stop was aimed. Its 4.31 percent drawdown is evidence that, in dollar terms, the account was never exposed to the full size of that move, because the position itself was small. Both are real, published numbers about the same ticker, and reading either one without the other would have missed half the story.

OXY's full 26-trade record still finished ahead, a 10.79 percent return with a 38.46 percent win rate and a profit factor of 1.4148, gross profit of 27,060.47 dollars against gross loss of 16,272.33 dollars. SYY's 12-trade record finished behind, negative 4.04 percent, with a profit factor of 0.2026, gross profit of only 88.61 dollars against gross loss of 492.25 dollars. A stop-based sizing rule limits how much a single bad trade costs the account. It does not decide whether the overall record makes money, and this pair shows both endings running the exact same formula. Past performance does not predict future results, and neither ticker's decade is a promise about what a 2 ATR stop would cost, or save, on the next one.