Or as we've all witnessed countless times...Your decision not to cut losses quickly leads to more haphazard adds (random, I might add) until you reach your "uncle" point...IOW, you turn small insignificant losses into devastating hits...repeatedly. There is no one on this forum less qualified to talk about risk management than yourself...
I use stops. I haven't done research papers since graduate school (long time ago). I trade for a living. Thank you for your input though, it is entertaining.
Then why did you "stop" yourself out on the very lows in mid January? It wasn't in the "system", it was the fact that you turned a small loss into a monster loss and couldn't take any more "pain"...IOW, if you are such a believer in this trade without stops philosophy, then you should have just kept adding and you probably would have had a small winner by early February. The problem is that you don't even believe the b.s. that you post any longer.
Well, I can't tell you that because I haven't studied this myself fully yet. But I made the following observation when developing my swingtrading portfolio long-only options system (ie. it trades many titles at the same time, keeping single positions upto 10 days): If the SL per position is set to less than 10% or more than 15% (depending on HV) then the performance starts to degrade significantly. So, that region seems to be an ideal area for SL for this environment. But as said I haven't studied it fully yet for my own case, just made that important observation and took simply the midpoint at about 12.5% SL (depending on HV). But of course it is obvious to see that my environment is a little bit different than what you and the other studies have tested. And: SL in this sytem does not necessarily mean a real stop. At such an SL level some other substrategies get applied like scaling-in etc. (HV=historical vola of the underlying)