It's better to just call them what they actually are, "stop orders" or "sell stops". "Stop-loss" has a pessimstic connotation and isn't completely descriptive. Whether somebody is taking a profit, a loss or initiating a short-position, you don't know which. Ideally, the market can clear out all of tonight's & tomorrow's expected stop orders at the absolute bottom and then move higher with that absence of selling pressure and then, oh yeah, the FED & PPT can intervene. We'll see.