How I sized down through the last 14% drawdown

We just came through a 14% account drawdown and I want to walk through how I handled position sizing, because this is where most people either panic-sell or double down; both wrong.

First: 14% is well within the historical drawdown range for this system. Backtests showed deeper. So step one was not treating it as an emergency. A drawdown inside the expected envelope is information that the system is behaving normally, not a signal to act.

Second: I keep sizing as a fixed fraction of the account, recalculated only at my quarterly review; not reactively mid-drawdown. That means my size naturally shrinks as the account shrinks, which is exactly the auto-protection you want. I did not manually cut size in a panic.

Third: I wrote down beforehand what would actually make me stop; sustained edge decay across many trades, not a single bad stretch. Having that written rule kept me from inventing a reason to quit at the bottom.

We're already most of the way back. The drawdown felt awful and changed nothing about the process. That's the point.