Based on an analysis of the characteristics of reactive power supplies and reactive loads, this paper presents a method for forming a lossless reactive network using an equivalent technique of modeling the branch admittance as a reactive power supply and the branch power loss as a virtual load. A downstream distribution matrix for a power system is constructed based on its reactive lossless network, and the analytical model and its algorithm for tracing reactive power flow (TRPF) is proposed. A method dealing with the abnormal downstream distribution matrix of active power flow also is discussed. The main advantage of the proposed method is that the matrix theory is used to analyze the TRPF model directly and no assumption on the flow distribution is needed. Case studies of the IEEE14Bus and IEEE30Bus systems demonstrate the accuracy and the validity of the proposed method.