SOLD or The Importance of Stop orders

Yesterday's potential inverse head and shoulders pattern died an untimely death this morning. A gap down below all support stopped me out at the open for a small loss. Take a look at the chart below and you can quickly see how important the stop was. GDX went down another 3.6 % after I was stopped out.
Stops are important, not only to save your cash when a trade goes against you, but being stopped out allows you to put the trade behind you and plan for the next one. I'm not staring at the computer screen trying to will GDX to go up. Instead I'm watching for the next set up. It doesn't matter if I buy the next one higher or lower, it only matters that it goes up after I buy.

So now GDX is below all of the support for the past 22 months. It could go a lot lower fast. I need to wait for an obvious flag to buy now. During the three month meltdown of 2008 there were four profitable buy flags and two breakouts above a rising channel, all of which were good buys, so even if it heads down from here, there can be several good buys along the way.