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I'd put a sell order lower, maybe 10%, in case you missed your mental stop. You don't want to get picked off just because your stock which was hovering around -6% went to -8.01% for a few minutes on a weird day, when you are following the chart and are watching its fluctuations closely. But hey, it's all a matter of style. I got out of the market 100% in March 2000 when I was down 8% overall. I sure didn't ride any losers to the bottom! But I also stopped paying attention, and missed a great last 6 months. Oh well.

I use the same rule. I rolled a few thou from my Fido 401k to my Fido IRA. Via the IRA, I would buy and sell QQQ, MDY and SPY with goals like a 12 to 15% increase with stop orders. So I had double sell orders. When I got a certain profit % I sold. Fortunately Bob Brinker warned us to get out of the market when you did and my sell orders save my bacon on some QQQ and MDY stocks.

I converted most of my 401k to Pimco Total Return which was great until this summer, rod the Ginny Mae bond funds for a while with the Pimco. I got back into Mutual funds after 9/11 and the ones I got into have been basically good for us up to now. That was when I realized that a Morningstar 5 star fund might have been great for the past 10 years. Then the manager or team had not idea of what to do in the current market.

I went to the leader of the category philosophy with some ties to the Morningstar principles, and it has served us well.