that's how I approach it too, managing risk.  

most of the masses are more concerned with profits or potential profits and NOT risk.  Over the years I've seen more people get more frustrated and angry about missing a strong move up in a stock, than they do about taking a big loss on a position.  That's backwards

Another way to think about your trades is who much you are willing to risk: So if in your trading account you are willing to risk $250 per trade, as long as you know where your initial stop is, you can calculate how many shares you can buy based on your risk if you are stopped out, if the stop is hit you lose $250, your risk is predefined.

for example if there's a stock that you see a coil on and your entry would be $22 and you determined that your initial stop should be placed at the most recent higher low of $21, that's $1 risk, so that means you should buy 250 shares if that's the amount you are willing to risk on the trade.  And all of you should be setting initial stops, otherwise you can fall into a bad psychological trap if it goes against you where you get emotional and are no longer objective

read this part from my book on stops:

Whenever you buy a stock, always have an exit strategy and immediately place a stop. First off you need to know where your stop is in order to calculate your risk/reward ratio.

Don’t fall trap to the ‘I’ll just give it a little more room trap’.

This is an emotional rabbit hole that can happen whenever you buy a stock and then do not immediately or soon thereafter place a hard stop loss order. If the stock goes up nicely after you buy it, you generally don’t have a problem, however if the stock goes against you, and you don’t have a hard stop loss in place, that’s where you can fall into this trap. For example, let’s say you buy a stock at $10 and it falls to $9.5 where you might have had a psychological stop in mind but that wasn’t live.  Since you didn’t have it as a live stop order in place (or you did but decided to cancel it) it becomes easy to justify an excuse why you can give it a bit more room, the stock falls more, you give it just a bit more room once again, this continues and repeats and soon you are down 10%, 20%, 30%, 40% and at a huge loss. Especially for swing trading it’s best to place your stop order immediately after you enter a trade and then adhere to that order if it looks like it’s going to be filled, let yourself stop out. Remember, stocks are not spouses, you are not married to them, if stopped out you can simply buy them back again after the chart sets up again to a good risk/reward setup. Steve and I stop out of positions all the time, simply to buy them back again soon after.

You might tell me that you’ve heard some traders say that they don’t use stop losses. Yes, I know quite a few exceptional day traders who don’t place stops.  However, first and foremost they are extremely disciplined, and secondly for their style of fast trading it might be less advantageous to use stop orders and instead manually exit the trade on their own.  For swing trading especially, the best practice is to immediately set your live stop order immediately after you enter the trade. Remember my rule, always know your exit price before you even buy the stock!