How Long Does the IHSG Actually Take to Recover From a Big Drawdown?
5 min read
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5 min read
If you've watched the IHSG since the start of this year, you already know the feeling. The index hit an all time high of 9,075.41 on 15 January 2026, then fell as low as 5,643.19 by 30 June 2026, before climbing back to around 6,525.69 by 21 August 2026 (Databoks). That still leaves the index about 28% below its January peak. The question that actually matters once you're sitting on a loss like that isn't how big the drop was. It's how long a drawdown like this usually takes to recover.
A drawdown is simply the size of a fall from a previous peak to the lowest point after it, measured as a percentage. Recovery means the index climbs back to that same peak level, not just up off the bottom. Those two milestones get confused a lot, and the gap between them is where a lot of the real waiting happens. The IHSG has been through two major drawdowns in the last two decades with a full, dated recovery on record. Here's what actually happened, in months, not vibes.
The IHSG closed at an all time high of 2,830.26 on 9 January 2008, driven by a mining stock rally tied to rising global oil prices. Nine months later, the global financial crisis and a domestic stock default case dragged the index down to 1,111.39 on 28 October 2008, a decline of about 61% (Kompas). That is a deep enough fall that the index needed to gain roughly 155% off the bottom just to get back to where it started, since percentage losses and the percentage gains needed to undo them are not symmetric.
The IHSG didn't cross back above 2,830 until 31 March 2010. Counted from the October 2008 low, that's about 17 months of climbing before the crisis was, in index terms, fully behind it. Counted from the January 2008 peak all the way around the round trip, it's closer to 27 months, over two years.
COVID-19 hit the IHSG hard and fast. From a pre-pandemic level of 6,329.31 in mid January 2020, the index fell to 3,937.63 by 24 March 2020, a decline of about 38% in roughly ten weeks. That's a similar-sized drop to the one this year, just compressed into a much shorter window.
What happened next is where the "how long to recover" question gets genuinely interesting, because there isn't one answer, there are two. The IHSG closed back above its pre-pandemic level of 6,329 on 11 January 2021 (Kompas), about 9.5 months after the March 2020 bottom. If you were only tracking "back to where I was right before the crash," that's your answer.
But the IHSG's actual all time high at that point wasn't the pre-pandemic level, it was 6,693.46, set back in February 2018. The index hadn't even fully recovered from an earlier stall before COVID hit. That older record wasn't broken until 19 November 2021, when the IHSG closed at 6,720.26 (IDX Channel), close to 20 months after the March 2020 low.
| 2008 crash | 2020 crash | |
|---|---|---|
| Peak | 2,830.26 (9 Jan 2008) | 6,329.31 (mid Jan 2020) |
| Trough | 1,111.39 (28 Oct 2008) | 3,937.63 (24 Mar 2020) |
| Decline | About 61% | About 38% |
| Recovered to prior peak | 31 Mar 2010 | 11 Jan 2021 |
| Months from trough to recovery | About 17 | About 9.5 |
A crash roughly 1.6 times deeper took nearly twice as long to fully undo. That's not a coincidence, and it's not just the asymmetric math from a bigger percentage loss either.
The 2008 drawdown came from a systemic global banking crisis: credit markets froze, and the recovery depended on the entire financial system stabilizing before capital started flowing back into emerging markets like Indonesia. The 2020 drawdown was a sharp, single shock, a forced economic stop, met almost immediately by coordinated global stimulus and rate cuts that pushed money back into risk assets within months. Same asset class, same exchange, very different mechanisms behind the fall, and that difference shows up directly in how long the climb back took.
That's also why a past recovery time is a description of what happened before, not a forecast. Nobody can tell you in advance which kind of crash the next one will be, or is.
As of 21 August 2026, the index is about 28% below its January 2026 all time high, having already climbed back roughly 16% from its 30 June 2026 low (Databoks). That puts it in the same rough decline territory as the 2020 COVID crash, though the shape of the fall and the reasons behind it are different. You can check today's IDX sentiment and volatility any time on NetWort's market page.
None of this tells you when, or whether, the current drawdown fully recovers. What the 2008 and 2020 episodes do tell you is that "recovered" can mean very different waits depending on which peak you're measuring against, and that even a IHSG down 30% or more before has, on record, come all the way back.
If you're sitting on a loss right now, the number that actually matters for your own money isn't the IHSG's drawdown, it's yours. NetWort's Portfolio Health card tracks your own portfolio's max drawdown in real time, right alongside your other risk signals, so you can watch your own recovery as it happens instead of guessing at it. Go check yours on your dashboard.
For the other half of this math, how much of a gain a given loss actually needs to break even, see the asymmetric math of loss recovery.