I will give a very short discourse on stop loss orders... portee44 and I have each given longer verisions.... we have both been caught years ago before we knew better...you hear people on BNN saying "put in stop losses"... does not work for small markets ... what happens is you may have 20K, 30K shares , whatever sitting quite a ways below the current market.. only the brokers can see these orders... many times there may only be a few thousand shares that they have to sell down to hit your stop losses ... they can sell down or short and trigger your stop loss and BANG- they have a bunch of cheap stock.... the SP immediately rebounds and you are left holding an empty bag with a bewildering look ... wondering how and why that happened... its painful.... I lost 50K shares like that once and lost a lot of money as it never ever came back to where I was stopped out and kept on climbing.... if anyone else wants to do a longer version be my guest.... please tell your friends.. . stop losses are DANGEROUS to your financial health unless you are in markets that trade millions and millions of shares or you are in large caps that do large volume.... W.