life saving lost, page-64

While I agree with 1 & 2, and mostly agree with 3 & 4, I disagree with 6, 7, & 8. There is nothing wrong with discussion, just don't use it as a reason to invest, only a means to do more research. I have learnt about lots of interesting companies that I would never have learnt about without discussion, both here and offline.

5 is problematic. I believe you should have soft stop losses (i.e. you choose to sell if the SP drops below a predefined limit), but not hard stop loss orders (i.e. where you use your trading account to automatically sell if the SP drops below a price). The reason why is I have seen the big boys play games far too often creating a flash crash and hitting all the retailers stop losses. You really don't want to be sold out because the SP drops below your stop loss price for 10 minutes and then bounces straight back.