RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: dirty trading game is onereality, I would take the opposite position that market orders are almost always bad:
1) In a really bad market selloff (e.g., 1987) the market order mechanism breaks down entirely, and you can end up executing 30 minutes after you place the order and at a catastrophic price (think 20% down from the bid when you placed the trade).
2) 90% of the time when there is a bad news sell off the crowd is wrong about it. You get a huge opening capitulation and the market makers exploit those market orders to really move the bid down substantially. 90% of the time what you see next is an attempted recovery, which sometimes sustains and sometimes doesn't but almost always there is some recovery and you can get a decent limit order executed into that rebound.
3) 10% of the time you get a catastrophic selloff. This should be familiar to all Yellow Media holders since it happened to the stock multiple times in 2011. Let's not forget the break of support at $2 CAD around late September 2011, and that think that opened around $1.50 and went to $1.00 and just kept moving down. Okay, limit order would have been the best choice there, but I don't think sacrificing 90% of your trades to make 10% look good is a reasonable tradeoff. Usually the right move when you have a catastrophic selloff is to just admit to yourself that you made a mistake, admit that right or wrong the market views this as extremely serious, and just swallow and sell at any limit you think will capture the bid ask spread. If you miss it move the order down until you hit. The bottom line is that you may end up catching the trade at $1.00 CAD instead of $1.50 CAD, and in the big picture you managed your losses as well as you could.