Last night, I impulsively placed an order when my hands were a bit itchy—thinking, “It’s just a matter of a few seconds.” In the end, I got hit with full slippage, and the execution price was way more outrageous than what I had in my head… After reviewing it, though, it wasn’t really bad luck: the pool’s depth was thin to begin with, and I chased it with two orders—basically pushing the price up myself. To put it bluntly, at the time I only stared at the candlestick chart, without first checking the depth and the quote path; my timing was also off, and the more I panicked, the more I lost.

Recently, the whole debate in the group about “privacy coins/mixer compliance” is also pretty similar: a bunch of people get emotionally fired up first, and nobody looks at the details. I’m setting myself a simple, old-school rule now: if I can’t understand it, then I won’t move—especially when it involves routing, slippage, authorization, and things like that. Once I don’t have a clear handle on it, I treat it as a sign that my chance to pay tuition has already been used up, so I’ll just leave it at that.