It got hung again, which is pretty annoying. Last night I looked at an ETH pool’s depth and it seemed fine, so without thinking I placed an order at the usual pace. The slippage went straight to 0.8%... Tsk. I went back and checked the on-chain data—at that time, liquidity had already been pulled out by a large margin, I just hadn’t refreshed to confirm before I placed the order. Plainly speaking, depth is dynamic; you can’t just look at a rough estimate and rush in.

Recently, I’ve been seeing people in the circle joking about how US stock risk appetite and ETF fund flows move in sync—some think that’s more useful than on-chain signals. I still think macro can at most give you a direction. When you actually take action, you still have to rely on your own process—node confirmation, watching depth, and placing orders in batches. Don’t skip a step. In the group, some people also talked about how volatility has been higher lately, and that you need to adjust your trading tempo, otherwise you’re likely to eat this kind of dumb loss.

I’ll note this down for now. Next time, I’d rather be half a beat late than get too smart for my own good.