I don't know why you create another alias to do that. If you have no arguments, chaning aliasses sounds like a dumb thing to do. It won't help your case any more if you think so.
This does not mean I'm "running stops." It means I'm hunting the area where I know stops are placed and then taking the other side when the market reverses. Don't write articles (as a reporter would) and take things out of context to satisfy your bias. If you could understand everything that's contained on this site then you would understand why, under highly specific situations, I trade with a very wide stop. http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/time-series-analysis/#trend
The funniest part about this thread is pretty much everyone, with the exception of Bone, believes the only way to manage risk is with stops when, in fact, that's the absolute worst way to manage risk because of the randomness of the market. To say any more would only invite stupidity because authors and brokers have folks brain washed that every trade that ever gets taken MUST have a stop. I'd be willing to bet that 95% of the ET crowd doesn't even know what a correlation study is and how to use one.
Sorry, man, but within certain parameters, the market is anything but random. My initial stop gets hit less than 20% of the time, i.e. I can predict, with 80%+ confidence, how much room my trade needs. If the market goes beyond that point, I simply stop out and re-enter. I view a stopped out trade as a cost of doing business, not some tragedy that is to be avoided by piling hedge upon hedge upon hedge or waiting who knows how long until the trade finally goes my direction. I'll probably make about 450 trades this year, what do I care if 80 or so of them get stopped out at the initial stop, especially since about 60% of them will be outright winners and my winners are more than 1.5X the size of my losers and in the last 2 months, with some tweaks to my strategy, they are closer to 1.9X. If your stats are better, kudos, but if they aren't, maybe you should be listening to me, rather than assuming just because you are strategy is superior. How hard is that to understand? And I didn't need a correlation study to figure that out, I just watched the fluctuations of the market and how far they went under specified conditions. If I can identify scenarios that have less than 20% probability of being hit in an allegedly "random" market (and I'm not talking about 100 ES point stops, either, sometimes I'm risking as little as 4-5 points and still not getting hit. It's all about volatility), well, that tells me that the market is anything but "random". That you haven't noticed this non-random activity is your own problem, not mine.
You don't need to know what a correlation study is to be able to trade and make money. It goes up you buy it, it goes down you sell it. You get out when the market tells you that your wrong. Simple as. In my experience any traders leaving positions on without stops are told to leave the office and not return.
I think you misunderstood me LM. My point is....should you choose there is "another way." There's plenty of ways to make money in the markets and even more ways to lose it. As I mentioned before there are certain trades where I will place a stop as close as 6 ticks, there are others that are managed with the trade out button - i.e. a manual loss, and then there are others that are managed with other instruments. If using a stop-only method works for you then there is no reason to change but for the majority of the folks trading, I have to agree with emg. Stops create losses. There are other options and if you studying how hedge funds trade they rarely use stops. Risk management is art just as any other aspect of trading is.
In my experience, any trader who left a stop on was told to the leave the office and not return because all they did was lose money. It was the ones who got more creative about managing risk who got to stick around. There's a reason the highly respected prop firms and hedge funds recruit from the likes of MIT, NYU, or any other school that has a respected program in Quantitative Finance. Perhaps the book that's done more for my trading is "Option Volatility and Pricing," by Natenburg. If you really want to learn how to manage risk read this book.
I reckon after 15 years in the futures business, 10+ years of trading my own book, running a prop office and managing a team of 30+ traders, I know how to manage risk---and I didn't learn it from some book on options (yawn)