The drawdown of a stock indicates how much time it's spent "underwater" - it's essentially the percentage drop of its price from a peak to a trough, with the drawdown resetting to zero if a previous high is reached.  The drawdown of a stock is a valuable risk measure and is employed by traders to gauge volatility.

This application:

• downloads historical stock prices from Yahoo Finance for a chosen ticker symbol (this requires a connection to the Internet),
• defines a procedure that calculates the drawdown of the historical stock price
• and plots the drawdown against the adjusted close price of the asset

By changing the ticker symbol and the two dates, you can examine drawdown of any stock between any period.

The application uses Maple 18's improved Internet connectivity; you can now download data from a URL into a matrix using ImportMatrix().