🧲 Maker Orders, Near-Misses & Learning to Not Trade
Today’s evolution wasn’t about more trades.
It was about better decisions when trades almost happen.
We’ve been refining how the bot reacts to near-miss entries — situations where the setup is good, but the expected edge is just a few basis points short once fees and spread are considered.
Instead of forcing a taker trade (and donating edge to fees), we now:
Arm a Maker Pullback when the gap is small
Place a limit order below market (maker-only)
Give it a short time-to-live (~15s)
Cancel it cleanly if price doesn’t come to us
No chasing. No FOMO. No “just because it’s close”.
What actually happened in practice
During this run, the bot evaluated multiple strong candidates, but intentionally skipped all of them.
Why?
Because discipline beat impatience.
Most skips were due to:
expected edge still below fees & spread
order book imbalance not confirming
top-of-book liquidity below threshold
Even when a Maker Pullback was armed, the system did not send an order unless all remaining quality gates agreed.
Armed ≠ executed — and that’s by design.
Universe snapshot (what we actually watched)
Out of a filtered universe of ~45 USDC pairs, the bot ranked and monitored the Top 10 at this moment:
BTCUSDC
ETHUSDC
YGGUSDC
NEARUSDC
TAOUSDC
SEIUSDC
LINKUSDC
FDUSDUSDC
0GUSDC
TURTLEUSDC
Plenty of volatility. Plenty of movement.
Still: no forced trades.
The real takeaway
This wasn’t a “no trades” run.
It was a successful filter test.
The system:
saw opportunities
quantified their edge
tried to improve entry quality via maker pullbacks
and walked away when the math still said “no”
That’s progress.
Because in live trading, not trading is often the most profitable decision you can make.
More data → more refinement → fewer dumb trades.
Onward.
