That's a very interesting point you raise re stops Orwell . If I really like a stock on a fundamental level I don't use stops , though I understand that for the average punter out there stops are essential I guess . But I worked out long ago that it was far more profitable to buy a few more if the market took the SP down than to get stopped out . In fact there are times when stops would've cost me a lot of money and very rare to have saved me ,because on the vast majority of occasions I got the stock right but the timing wrong. Sometimes it takes time
I realise that that's not the experience of most traders , if you're jumping in and out of stocks on a daily basis then the mantra is that you must have stops. That particularly applies to pure specs ,where sometimes you can't get out at the stop level either