Quote from Oz Cillator:
Don, I fear you're not expressing yourself well with regard to stop orders. One might infer, from your example of the broker with 100,000 shares to sell, that stop loss orders on the buy side of a specialists' book are buy orders that will get filled at the lower, negotiated price. In reality, that order is a sell order that gets triggered when the stock hits the price of the stop. It then becomes a market order to sell which the specialist can buy, if he chooses, at the price of the stop limit or lower. This is opposed to other small BIDS that the specialist, if he is truly fair, might pull off the book and give the lower price to on the 100K print.
My point about the specialist, as far as I know, not being permitted to create or "initiate" (consecutive?) plus or minus ticks means that he, by himself, can't really "target" stop orders left on his book as you suggest. In other words he's prohibited from hitting several, consecutive small bids and "walking" the stock down to a level where a sell stop order of 5000 shares sits, trigger the stop, and buy the 5000 down another half-point, if no other bids are around. (In the real world does the specialist have ways to get around this? I'm sure they do because we know how most of them put maintaining a "fair and orderly" market ahead of profits!)
One other thing. I didn't say stop orders were a classic and accepted trading principle. I said "cutting losses and letting profits run" was. I would suggest that your strategy of 'stop winners", not that it has no merit, flies in the face of that and contradicts your own words from past threads; "once your in the trade look for good exit points; NO PRE-DETERMINED ONES".