I think retail investors actually don’t need to study “block builders/Builder, bundle” like a research paper… but how much is enough to know? Put simply, there are two points: your trades may not get into a block in the order you want; and the price you see may have been pre-calculated by the “packagers.” Don’t get hung up on the division of labor between the builder, relay, and searcher—remember the outcome: your swap might get bundled, front-run, or forced to eat worse slippage.

What I need to be reminded of is this: don’t automatically assume that the moment you see big on-chain transfers or any movement between an exchange’s hot and cold wallets, you’re witnessing “smart money” copying strategies. In many cases, those transfers are just risk control, consolidation, or changing addresses, and they don’t have a strong causal link to the next K line. Anyway, my approach is pretty straightforward: split large orders into smaller ones, don’t let slippage get too big, use protected routing/private order placement if you can (use it if you can), and accept that some losses are just “on-chain transaction fees.” That’s it for now.