Sigh… I just went back to review a low-quality token trade, and again, I got eaten by slippage. The depth I was looking at was clearly okay, but once I dumped it all in one go, the executed average price ended up nearly two ticks higher than I expected. Plainly put, it’s because my order timing was too sloppy. When I saw that line start to surge, I was so eager to click, I ignored that thin liquidity in the order book.

Lately I keep seeing people complain about miners’ income and that MEV stuff—saying the right to order has been played with in all kinds of ways, and retail basically is just meat on the chopping block. And I think, isn’t this just the same logic as on-chain slippage? If you rush, they won’t; what they make is the “emotional tax” you pay by being impatient with that one moment.

Anyway, I’ve now set a hard rule for myself: when I see something I want to rush, I’ll watch the order book for three seconds first, then take another look at the order flow density over that period. If the bid/ask looks as flimsy as paper, then I’ll split my buy orders into smaller chunks and enter in batches to test the waters. After getting taught a lesson too many times, you’ve got to learn somehow…

(Someone replied saying, “Then you might as well just sit on L2 and place limit orders”—)