Perry Kaufman agrees with you. This past weekend I purchased and downloaded a Kaufman interview from TAofS&C http://traderscom.stores.yahoo.net/-v13-c06-intervw-pdf.html I'm currently following/studying some of Kaufman's backtesting suggestions from is books.
Not sure how many of you have actually traded but from my experience as a broker who broked many of the well known guys back in the 90's early 2000's the majority used stop losses to one degree they might not have have hard stops but they always had them. There was one notable exception where he lost over 120 mill short the S&P. The market is is free agent and cannot be relied upon to do what you expect it to all the time stops simply cushion and protect one from from such randomness.
I think there are no absolutes regarding stops, some trading styles lend themselves to hard stops, others need more flexible, creative stops.
no, i used stops in the past. but have learned the truth recently.- position sizing and correct entries are key. regards, surf
right on PFT. My strategy is to basically "nibble" positions at the beginning. If they confirm, I grab more, but no one positiion is going to kill me. My position sizing is such that if any one of my positions were to go to 0, then that would be equivalent to some other traders highly leveraged stop loss. Somebody posted a link to Chris "Jesus" Ferguson's strategy of taking 0 to $10,000 by using an ultra-conservative strategy a little bit back. That was eye opening. I essentially do the same thing with trading. You could say that my strategy is a mini-market maker swing to long-term strategy.
What took you out of the long bet when this change occurred since you have no stops? Seeing your consistency thread, i am now convinced this thread must be an attempt at humor.