Just as I started, I chased a trade out of impulse, and the slippage shot my blood pressure through the roof. The order book depth looked decent, but after I dumped in all at once, the fill price ended up about one percentage point higher than expected—and then I kept getting filled at several even worse prices. Later I realized it was right around the time of the US stock market open; those news bits about ETF fund flows had the market’s sentiment stirred up like a mess, and all the depth got scraped together until it was thin and patchy. Basically, the moment the market shows any gusts, those high-frequency bots start running ahead, and retail trades end up getting placed like jumping off a cliff. From now on, I really need to wait for the order book to stabilize before acting—don’t trust those “great positions” for the few seconds you see them. Anyway, paying tuition on one loss beats getting wrecked by liquidation later.