Stop losses have a main important role: To prevent further losses to your account. It is very important to use stop losses when you are away from your platform, incase a sudden change in price occurs. Here are some useful uses for stop losses:

1. To enforce money management rules
2. Prevention of further losses or big losses
3. At night when you are asleep, to protect your account.
4. For those using systems such as stop and inverse.

Mental Stop Losses
Many traders have claimed that their broker is hunting their stops. They place a stop, the price goes against them, touches their stop loss, closes their position at loss, then the price retraces in their favor. Could this happen? If your broker is not an honest one, yes it could.

An old solution is available for this problem. I always advise these kind of traders to place mental stop losses. They should remember the number in their mind, not placed on their platform. If the price goes near this number, then they should be alerted. If the price touches it, they should manually close the position. This way their broker will never know where they placed their stop, and thus could not hunt it.

Russian Roulette
I have seen many ex-great systems fail and crash at some time. Taking the last championship 2007 at mql4 as an example, in the first 10 days, 3 to 4 systems made 20,000 USD in profit. They were very aggressive, but if you see the results, you could say, wow, what great systems they are.

I just looked at their open positions, did not see any stop losses placed. After the 3rd week, they all blew their accounts. There is no reason ever, why a good trader won't use stop losses. It is like a russian roulette, one day it will hit your account and blow it off.