Yes, completely agree. And in fact for my own trading I don't use stops because they introduce downside that isn't there in many other situations. On the quan

Yes, completely agree. And in fact for my own trading I don't use stops because they introduce downside that isn't there in many other situations. On the quant trading analyses that I have done, adding stops frequently makes performance strictly worse while not helping that much when things get really extremely bad, because of course there is no guarantee of liquidity at your stop level if the market is dropping like a stone. So I've seen things like having a trigger in an order manager that at a certain price will place an aggressive IOC limit order to unwind something. In normal conditions that will behave exactly like an at-market stop loss order, except that in the case of really extreme disruption you won't get filled before your limit. So the hope is in those cases the market will bounce. You don't want to get unwound at any cost on your stop if the market is going to rapidly recover afterwards. It also means there's no information leakage if you're worried about your broker taking advantage of the information in your stop (paranoid, but yes...). As you've said, there's no panacea.