I'm not very good at the whole front-running thing, my speed and scripts are no good... But recently, looking at the receipts of my few swap transactions, even though I set a low slippage, the transaction price still got "pushed up," and comparing it to the two trades before and after in the block, it was basically a sandwich. To put it simply, you think you're catching opportunities, but sometimes you're just paying others' fees + tuition.

Arbitrage is the same; on-chain, the price difference looks great, but when you actually execute, you realize: gas, failed retries, routing around, plus being sandwiched, in the end, there's not much profit left. I now prefer to treat "opportunities" as alerts: whether liquidity is thin, if the pool is being watched, whether the wallet's price impact warning is actually scaring you.

Recently, I also heard about some regions raising taxes, tightening or loosening compliance back and forth, causing deposit and withdrawal expectations to change. On-chain, those aggressive buy-sell orders become even more frequent, and sandwiching more active... Anyway, I prefer small amounts, batch trades, and taking it slow if needed, for now.