Quote from SteveH:
In all serious though, deciding whether to buy a dip with a limit order or buy a breakout with a stop order is a personal preference rather than one being statistically better than the other when it comes to long-term reward vs. risk.
You can get pretty darn good at only needing 7 tick stop losses on the CL (with pullback limit orders) to get 15+ tick returns with a 50/50 chance. But there's the rub. The avg at-homer can't emotionally handle those kinds of odds in trading. They tend to constantly doubt the stability of the system they're trying to trade.
Now, if you offered up the same game in the form of a fair coin flip to the same at-homer, I'd bet anything that he/she would have no problems playing that game. Why? Because it is so ingrained in everyone's psyche that a fair coin flip *is* 50/50 that he/she will no longer concentrate on the individual wins/losses but more on the positive expectancy aspect of the game itself (where expectancy = (avg win * prob win) - (avg loss * prob loss) is positive and that means you will win over many many trials).