MSGI: stop losses can work sometimes but it's also easy to get burned .... one buys a good stock with strong fundamentals, gets stopped out with a 15% loss only to see the stock rally to a 50% gain thereafter ....
Clearly stop loss orders are no panacea for investors and traders ! Not to forget the manipulators who like to spike down a stock to trigger to the stop losses and buy at firesale prices before rallying the stock higher ....
As for market timing .... as I've posted many times before, anyone who can reliably forecast significant market moves with a some degree of accuracy can get rich rather quickly by trading put and call options on the major market indices. But I've never known anybody to have that ability and market timing newsletters over the long term consistently underperform those that stay fully invested.