[Your Mom]

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I work in the order room for a large online broker. It's my experience that specialists are a bunch of scam artists. It's also my opinion that stop orders at any time and market orders at the open are for complete suckers.

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Not always true. Market orders pre-open on the NYSE all have to be filled at the same price.

Say a stock had good news and a lot of people want to buy it. The specialist doesn't have much in inventory and is going to have to go short to fill all the buy orders. He wants to be able to buy it back at a lower price to make a profit on all the shares he went short at the open. So he gaps it up at a higher price than it should have at the open. All the buyers are filled at the open and people that held it prior will sell into the gap to take profits. As it drops, the specialist buys to cover his short. This is often referred to as "gap and crap". Putting in a market short order pre-open gets the same price as the buyers, since all orders have to be filled at the same price. So I'm basically riding the specialist's coattails. Sometimes a stock will "gap and go", but that takes a very strong stock indeed.

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Yes, market orders do have to all be filled at the same price, but on thinly traded stocks a market order can heavily influence what that opening price is.