Down $1,500 on a $10,000 account, you need a 17.6 percent gain just to see breakeven again, and your instincts will propose the worst available plan: size up and win it back this week. Every blown account has that plan somewhere in its history. The professional alternative is slower and mildly humiliating, and it works: cut size, rebuild proof, and let the arithmetic of a small edge do the digging.
The first 24 hours: stop and write
No more trading today, and none tomorrow. The account is not going anywhere, and the version of you that just lost 15 percent is not the one who should be pressing buttons. Instead, write the autopsy in numbers, not feelings: what was risked versus planned on each trade, where each stop was and whether it moved, which rule broke first. A hole that size is almost never one bad trade; it is one bad trade plus the four revenge trades that followed. The autopsy's job is to name the first domino, because that is the only one you can engineer against. If every rule was followed and the loss was honest variance at 1% risk, the drawdown would be a fraction of this size; a 15 percent day is nearly always a discipline event wearing a bad-luck costume.
The staged comeback
Return at quarter risk: $25 per trade instead of $100, for a minimum of 20 trades. Promotion to half risk ($50) requires 18 of those 20 executed fully to plan: planned entry, correct computed size, stop untouched. Another 20 trades at half risk with the same bar earns back full 1% risk. Any broken rule resets the current stage to zero. Notice what the promotion criteria never mention: profit. You cannot demand P&L from the market on a schedule, but you can demand compliance from yourself on one. The stages are not punishment. They are a controlled environment where confidence gets rebuilt on evidence instead of on one lucky green day.
Why the math still works at quarter size
At $25 risk with a 0.35R expectancy, 20 trades earn roughly $175. Trivial against a $1,500 hole, and that is the point: Stage 1 is not for recovery, it is for proof. The recovery itself belongs to full size and patience. At 1% risk and 0.35R per trade, $1,500 comes back in about 43 trades of expectancy, call it six to nine weeks of normal trading. Traders who accept that number recover. Traders who reject it as too slow are the ones who double size, meet an ordinary losing streak at the worst possible moment, and convert a 15 percent drawdown into a 40 percent one. The market does not know you are behind, and it prices your trades exactly as if you weren't. The only schedule that exists is the one your expectancy sets.
Guarding the comeback
Two guardrails keep the protocol honest. First, a hard daily stop of two losses during Stages 1 and 2: the recovering trader's biggest threat is a fresh tilt spiral, and two strikes ends the day before one can form. Second, score each day in the journal by execution grade, not dollars, and keep the streak visible: fifteen straight days of A-grade execution is the real signal that the trader who lost the $1,500 is not the one currently trading. The money returns as a side effect of that person showing up daily.