the.com/cold streak

means A run of consecutive bad luck or poor performance, especially in games, sports, or gambling, where things keep going against you.

from A compound of two plain English words doing exactly what they say. 'Cold' has long carried a metaphorical chill — by extension from temperature, it came to mean 'unlucky,' 'unfavorable,' or 'without warmth or success,' the same sense behind 'cold shoulder' and 'left out in the cold.' 'Streak,' originally a mark or line (a cousin of 'stroke' and the Old English 'strica'), came to mean an unbroken run or stretch — think of a streak of paint, then a streak of luck. Pair them and you get an uninterrupted stretch of misfortune. The 'hot streak / cold streak' pairing is firmly at home in American gambling and sporting slang, where players speak of being 'hot' (winning) or 'cold' (losing) as if luck itself had a temperature.