Hibernation or Shut-Down! Which is better and more secure!

Most laptop users these days prefer to put their laptop's in to Hibernation rather than turning them off completely by shutting down! But are you safe doing that, okay it help you when you want to work on your machine and all you have to do is "wake it up", but are you thinking about the risks involved in doing this. Lets give a scenario, you've been at work all day and you take your laptop home at night to do some extra work so instead of shutting down, you just close the lid and hey presto it's gone into hibernation. You driving or walking and your laptop is stolen from you, now all the thief has to do is open the lid of your laptop and he has access to all your doc's, important info, etc. Sure you might have a password but still your laptop would be compromised if you don't! Now you have the hassle of changing all your passwords, possibly your banking details and personal data in the hand of someone who could use that for their on means. You probably have pictures of your family, etc these too could be used in illegal ways. Now if you had shut down and you had a password on Start up or even in the BIOS so no one could change them and access your data that would be a LOT more secure and safer in the end. I mean so what if your laptop takes 3 minutes instead of 50 sec's to boot up, is loosing your precious data and more worth the risk. Think about it, I always shut down and never take it for granted that anything will be safe.