I made a pretty stupid trade yesterday, and looking back afterward, I feel a bit afraid: I clearly saw that the order book depth was exactly like that, yet I still had to go and slam in with a market order. I was also pretty casual about the slippage, thinking, “Just once”… In the end, the execution price got dragged along. When I look back at that moment—if I’d jumped just two more price levels, it really wouldn’t have been as simple as losing only a bit more than the trading fees.

To put it simply, it wasn’t the market trapping me—it was my order timing that was too rushed. When the depth is thin, splitting the order into a few parts and waiting for a bout of liquidity to come back, or simply not pushing in forcefully, matters more than anything like “judging which direction is right.” Lately, it feels like a whole bunch of people are tying ETF fund flows, US stock risk appetite, and crypto market gains and losses into one interpretation, and I’ve been watching too—but the more I look, the more it feels like this: the narrative can be lively, but don’t let your hands get heated up along with it. That’s it for now—place orders more slowly, and you’ll live longer.