I feel if you've got fewer skills in trading long-term investment or stop loss are going to be less likely to lose. you've got to find out the trading rules well and avoid greed to prevent the loss strategy Greed always results in evil.
Usually all emotions related things will lead you to meet stop-loss lol
; To avoid this, like you mentioned long term should be the simple solutions. Yes, I am a long term trader hence I never needed stop-loss functionality in my trading.
If making use of stop-loss is too hard and requires all skills then we can simply skip it by opting the positions to hold for longer duration. I mean you do not need to square off your positions at stop loss; you may leave it open for long term so that market will recover. It is possible only when we trade at spot markets.
I've seen a case mostly whereby exchange will hunt for stop loss and pump it up after most of the SL got triggered. I seldomly use it, most especially when trading on futures
This is how whales do manipulate the markets to eat up your stop-loss levels. Sudden spikes are usually the manipulations to hit the stop-loss and you get you away.
When we do trading, protecting our capital is our main goal and our second priority should be gaining money. It is the main reason why we should focus on having SL in every trade.
But your protecting way should not be in a way to reduce your capital over the time. I mean when you TA is not good and you keep hitting SL more frequently then making use of SL is not at all has any sense. Whenever I face a SL, then I will go working on finding what was wrong with my SL. So, that my next trade will not be the repeation of same mistake; this way I will recover my SL losses with next trade itself at most of the times.